Colosseum

One of the Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year

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.

Praise

"This is beautiful work, subtly but insistently awake to our fraught moment, most particularly the near death of an American city. This poet is prepared to knife open the scrim of somnambulism and complicity that keeps our peril hidden from us—at our peril. Colosseum is utterly absorbing, yes, but also memorable and preternaturally wise."—Carolyn Forche

 

"Colosseum is a book of polychromatic comprehensions and fiercely kinetic observation. In its vatic stock-taking of event and aftermath, the usual boundaries seem to fall away: interior and exterior, public and private, the intimacies of the close at hand and the overview clarities of distance interweave with precise and startling balance. Katie Ford's poetry scours, distills, unsettles, and awakens."—Jane Hirshfield

 

“Katie Ford's Colosseum is part of a contemporary plague journal, an epistle for the ruin of New Orleans that resounds with destructions both ancient and contemporary. Ford takes us through the carnage with brutal reportage and a disconsolate conversation with the divine. This is a poetry whose ultimate caritas is its resolute openness and its ability—in the face of human folly—to redeem us, terrible creatures that we are."—D. A. Powell

About the Author(s)

Katie Ford

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition and a chapbook, Storm. Individual poems have appeared in the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. She has received awards and grants from the Academy Center and is the poetry editor of New Orleans Review. She lives in Philadelphia.