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America's epic is the odyssey of appetite, Campbell McGrath declares, and these poems track those defining hungers across a social landscape by turns grave, risible, amazing, banal, cataloging the vortex of images in a ruined theater the culture comes to resemble, from Rocky and Bullwinkle to Blue Angels rampant on a field of static, / anthem and flag descending to darkness. In terza rima meditations, rock-and-roll elegies, and abecedarian lyrics, Pax Atomica documents the tangled romance between self and society (in which / the melody's ampersand ensnares us) in ways both new and familiar to readers of McGrath's five previous volumes. A continuation as well as a departure for one of America's most highly honored poets, this is poetry of formal eloquence and rhetorical power, of vision and engagement. Pax Atomicadescends into the maelstrom of American culture and emerges singing.

Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books, eight of them available from Ecco Press. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares, among other prominent publications, and his poetry is represented in dozens of anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, and lives with his family in Miami Beach.