Vanity corrupts the empires on the grand tour from ancient Rome to revolutionary Iran, from Europe in the Age of Reason to America in the Age of Television. William Logan's poems find Ovid in a London gentlemen's club, Romeo and Juliet in Florida, and the varnished splendors of religion and politics surviving at the seedy edge of culture. VAIN EMPIRES is breathtakingly intense in language and disturbing in its moral intelligence.
How do you feel?