Engine Empire

Cathy Park Hong

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Reader Score

82%

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Critic Reviews

Great

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Engine Empire is a trilogy of lyric and narrative poems that evoke an array of genres and voices, from Western ballads to sonnets about industrialized China to fragmented lyric poems set in the future. Through three distinct yet interconnected sequences, Cathy Park Hong explores the collective consciousness of fictionalized boomtowns in order to explore the myth of prosperity. The first sequence, called "Ballad of Our Jim," draws inspiration from the Old West and follows a band of outlaw fortune seekers who travel to a California mining town during the 1800s. In the second sequence, "Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!" a fictional industrialized boomtown draws its inspiration from present-day Shenzhen, China. The third and last section, "The World Cloud," is set in the far future and tracks how individual consciousness breaks up when everything--books, our private memories--becomes immediately accessible data. One of our most startlingly original poets, Hong draws together individual voices at odds with the world, voices that sing their wonder and terror.

Book Details

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: Aug 5th, 2013
Pages: 96
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.10in - 6.00in - 0.30in - 0.30lb
EAN: 9780393346480
Categories: • American - General

About the Author

Hong, Cathy Park: - Cathy Park Hong is the author of Translating Mo'um and Dance Dance Revolution and has won a Pushcart Prize and the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

Part of what makes that worthwhile is Hong's ability to turn her language into more than pastiche, developing styles of writing that feel dense with the historical richness of the English language--a history of borrowing, invention, and manipulation that Hong honors, in part, by making room for her own inventiveness. . . . a sustaining book, one that believes in the value of being moved by words--the value, that is, of being human.. --Jonathan Farmer

Cathy Park Hong is a seer of visions. Engine Empire is a brainy, glinting triptych about what powers 'progress, ' what its human costs are, and where it might be taking our species. Novelistic, meditative, offbeat, and soulful, Hong's poetry is many fathoms deep. --David Mitchell

If Hong is one of the best poets we have in America--and she is--it's because she filters her deeply-felt topical obsessions through such imaginative lenses that even a well-read reader can only gape in amazement. --Seth Abramson

An entertaining read, even as it says stark and haunting things about race, love, technology, and the capacities of language to hide or reveal unwelcome truths. . . . While there have always been lots of writers warning us about the corruptibility of language in the wrong hands, few others have made an unbrave new world such a pleasure to discover. --Craig Morgan Teicher"

Reading this book feels like listening to a symphony: Themes develop, vanish and recur amid Hong s abundant verbal music. . . . Hong s triumph is to alienate us from ourselves in order to reaffirm what makes us human. --Dave Lucas"

Part of what makes that worthwhile is Hong s ability to turn her language into more than pastiche, developing styles of writing that feel dense with the historical richness of the English language a history of borrowing, invention, and manipulation that Hong honors, in part, by making room for her own inventiveness. . . . a sustaining book, one that believes in the value of being moved by words the value, that is, of being human.. --Jonathan Farmer"

Cathy Park Hong does everything short of inventing her own language in order to show cultures clashing and spilling into each other. "

Starred review: Grapples with vocation and origin in a globalizing era. . . . full of luminous surprises. "

Will force you to question the possibilities life offers, in the past, the present, and the future. --Jeff Alessandrelli"