"John Balaban’s eighth poetry collection, moves around the globe through time. Alighting on key moments of cultural change and personal revelation -- from ancient Ionia to Viking traders on the Volga, Washington's troops crossing the Delaware, a Romanian poet in Paris waiting for the Nazis to take him away, the rubble of the World Trade Center, and a train ride through Dixie after the inauguration of Barack Obama -- Balaban looks at imperial shifts. With the attention of a documentary filmmaker and in deeply lyrical spells of longing and marvel, he considers the world in its innate beauty and complex ugliness. Balaban's genius -- as a world-renowned poet, translator, and activist -- is in naming what binds us, connecting the dots of history. The task of Empires is to sing of what endures"--Back cover.