John Balaban - 'Empires'

Balaban’s sixth collection of poetry considers America in its innate beauty and complex ugliness, in its powerfully healing landscapes and its destructive misadventures. With a compelling lyricism and cinematic imagery, Empires showcases the pervasiveness of the human spirit across a diverse cast of characters, both modern and ancient. 

“Balaban expresses a shrewd understanding of how the world works, and a clarion respect for life.”―Booklist (starred review) 

In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, Balaban is a translator of Vietnamese poetry, and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. He is a founder and director of the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. He is Professor Emeritus of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.