End of Empire
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  • Published: 15 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9780143138471
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $44.99
Categories:

End of Empire

  • Marissa Davis
Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jul 2025
Audiobook
1 Jul 2025
Paperback
15 Jul 2025
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From a prizewinning poet whose work “points to an unfathomably bright future for the canon” (Danez Smith), a stunningly lush collection about desire, resilience, and our fraught and ecstatic relationship with the natural world

From a prizewinning poet whose work “points to an unfathomably bright future for the canon” (Danez Smith), a stunningly lush collection about desire, resilience, and our fraught and ecstatic relationship with the natural world

A collection as remarkable for the force of its feeling as for the range of its vision, End of Empire explores the tensions of Black and American identity within an ecological framework. Inspired by the language and landscape of the poet’s rural Kentucky hometown and the ways that inherited religious and political narratives shape our relationships with our surroundings and ourselves, these poems reckon with the ways the speaker, their body, and their natural and ideological surroundings continuously remake each other. Formally dynamic, emotionally resonant, and rich with biblical, mythological, and historical allusions, these are elegant, impeccably crafted pieces that evoke the fearsome power of nature and of the tangled, sensual self.
  • Published: 15 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9780143138471
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $44.99
Categories:

Praise for End of Empire

Praise for the work of Marissa Davis:

“[Davis' is] a voice so varied and skilled one has to step back to see that the work is not that of a great, anthologized generation but of one stellar talent singing all the choir parts perfectly, wildly. The embodied poetics found in My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak exist brightly in the canon of Black femme poets . . . Davis is ‘prepared to swallow flame’ and anyone picking up this chapbook should be prepared to do the same.” —Danez Smith, author of Homie, Cave Canem’s 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize Judge's Citation

“I was so taken with the sweep and splendor of Davis’s quiet cataclysm of a poem that I invited her to read it for The Marginalian, which she kindly did — a lovely voice that surprised and invigorated me with its audible youth, only amplifying the poem’s atmosphere of possibility and its wondrous, defiant commitment neither to look away from a broken reality nor to cease cherishing this astonishing world in its brokenness.” —Maria Popova, author of Figuring