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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
"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



Book Information
ISBN 9780393346480
Author Cathy Park Hong
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 132g
Dimensions(mm) 211mm * 155mm * 8mm