ALL EMPIRES MUST

Author: Mia Kang

Publisher: Airlie Press (2025)

All Empires Must weaves in and out of Rome, taken as a figure for empire, ruin, and the seductions of both. An abstracted narrative concerns the fortunes of Rhea Silvia, the mythical mother of Romulus and Remus, whose story is either a romance or a romantic violation; in any case, she's dead. In these sometimes meditative, sometimes schematic poems, the desire for contact with a place, a past, or a person (including the self) is always complicated by boundaries and overdetermined by power. Language, then, becomes an austere pleasure. Unflinchingly, All Empires Must takes the measure of harm, without promise of repair.