My Favorite Warlord

Book excerpt: A third collection from an award-winning poet, author of Sightseer in this Killing City, whose "gift is breathtaking" (Naomi Shihab Nye) The themes of identity, relationships, and the poet's sense of origin are at the heart of Eugene Gloria's rich and captivating new collection. The title poem weaves together Japan's sixteenth-century warlord Hideyoshi with a meditation about the poet's father's dementia; "Here on Earth" embraces post-racial America and the speaker's own sense of displacement in the Midwest. In elegy and psalm, as well as ancient forms from Asia such as the haibun and pantoum, these elegant and passionate poems enact rage, civility, love, travel, and art as well as explore Gloria's own fears of frailty and erasure.