What Though the Field Be Lost - by Christopher Kempf (Paperback)

About the Book

""What Though the Field Be Lost" uses the battlefield there as setting and subject for poetry that engages with ongoing conversations about race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory in the United States. With compassion and empathy, as well as humor and humility, Kempf stitches documentary details-incorporating language from monuments, soldiers' letters, and eyewitness accounts of the battle-alongside personal moments and reflections that capture the overlapping planes of historical past and public present. Milton's famously charismatic Satan offers a model of the allure in which evil can be veiled, as Kempf investigates the ambivalences and evasions involved in any understanding of national, or nationalist, identity. The author's experiences living in Gettysburg are read, in turn, against Milton's account of Adam and Eve, the book's title alluding to the fact that, though the Civil War itself may be over, the field of Gettysburg remains contested. Throughout, Kempf intercuts historical materials with references to contemporary social and political unrest, including monument protests, police shootings, and often-heated battle reenactments. Shuttling deftly between past and present, "What Though the Field Be Lost" examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy"--

Book Synopsis

Based on two years living and researching in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, What Though the Field Be Lost uses the battlefield there as a way to engage ongoing issues involving race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory.

With empathy and humility, Kempf reveals the overlapping planes of historical past and public present, integrating archival material--language from monuments, soldiers' letters, eyewitness accounts of the battle--with reflection on present-day social and political unrest. Here monument protests, police shootings, and heated battle reenactments expose the ambivalences and evasions involved in the consolidation of national (and nationalist) identity. In What Though the Field Be Lost, Kempf shows that, though the Civil War may be over, the field at Gettysburg and all that it stands for remain sharply contested.

Shuttling between past and present, the personal and the public, What Though the Field Be Lost examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy.

Review Quotes

What Though the Field Be Lost offers us a guided tour through the tragic cyclorama of American history. Revisiting, revising, and reforming constructions of whiteness from Milton to Whitman to the Southern Agrarians and beyond, Christopher Kempf refuses to 'plant plastic flags for Gettysburg's fallen' when more reparative futures await our construction.--Srikanth Reddy, author of "Underworld Lit"

Deeply thoughtful and statement rich, What Though the Field Be Lost steeps us in an expansive interrogation of Civil War statues, racial violence, war, slavery, masculinity, and the breaking news that threatens to inundate and overwhelm. Throughout, Kempf shows that old familiar history has a fierce appetite. It waits to consume us all.--Janice N. Harrington, author of "Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin"

This is a brilliant and beautifully ambivalent volume in which the poet uses his entire self to make whole and healing poems.--Jericho Brown, author of "The Tradition," winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

About the Author

Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collection Late in the Empire of Men. His work has appeared in the Believer, Best American Poetry, the Kenyon Review, the New Republic, PEN America, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Kempf teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.