With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, this title offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past.

Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber's award-winning second collection of poetry brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.

"Through sheer persistence I'll find a book in which almost every poem makes me fall down, so dizzied am I by the world spinning and resolving itself in new ways. Such is the experience I had with Kathleen Graber's The Eternal City. . . . The book is barely able to contain these thought-full poems that spool outward into the world around the poet, both the world of the world and the world of the mind, and curl back on themselves."---Marilyn McCabe, ConnotationPress.com