Author's Statement

Whenever I receive a phone call from a number I don't know, I let myself hope, for just a second, that it's a publisher or prize committee and that I've won something incredible.  Inevitably, of course, it's a call center in South Dakota wanting to know if I'm happy with my wireless carrier or how often I dine out; but when I saw "Washington, D.C." and when I heard "This is the NEA," I proceeded, like an idiot, to run around campus pumping my fist and hugging everyone I know. 

I'm deeply grateful for that moment. 

I'm grateful, to both the NEA and its panel of judges this year, for the financial support which will allow me to research a new manuscript on urban infrastructure and economic catastrophes, and which, more generally, will help alleviate those concerns of time and money we all, I think, find so threatening to the writing of careful, intelligent poetry.  I'm also grateful, and perhaps more importantly, for the encouragement and validation an award like this provides.

The poems in this application, including "Yosemite Lodge Food Court," are from a manuscript called Late in the Empire of Men, which explores how American military and economic imperialism is undergirded by the rhetorical construction of its citizens, in particular boys and young men. Through video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, for example, or through sports like auto-racing and football, American males are inducted into discourses of violence which directly underwrite the imperial state, a civilization bound, like those other empires I explore in the collection, Rome and Carthage, to collapse beneath the weight of its own myth-making.