Colosseum

The visceral new work by Katie Ford, whose poems "possess the veiled brilliance of stained glass windows seen at night" (The New York Times Book Review)

If you respect the dead

and recall where they died

by this time tomorrow

there will be nowhere to walk.

—"Earth"

With gravity and resplendence, Colosseum confronts ruin in the ancient world and in the living moment, from historical accounts and from firsthand experience. Displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Katie Ford returns this powerful report attesting to the storm's ferocity and its aftershock. Ford examines other catastrophes—those biblical, obscured by time, and those that play out daily, irrefutably, in the media. Colosseum is an essential, moving book in its insistence that our fates are intertwined and that devastation does not discriminate.