reviewed on May 7, 2025

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Like a biography-in-verse, Mia Kang’s All Empires Must imagines into existence the life and liaisons of the mythical figure of Rhea Silvia, mother of the twins Romulus and Remus, who founded the city of Rome.  In Silvia's voice, the book’s opening poem is a posthumous dramatic monologue evocative—in its melancholy, in its elegiac nostalgia—of Thomas James’s masterful “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh.”  “Will I return to Thebes?” James’s pharaonic queen wonders.  “Who digs / my grave?” asks Kang's Silvia.  “I can bend like anyone until the dirt // is too heavy.”

 

If Silvia enters the mythological record only after being raped by the god Mars, Kang resituates her at the epicenter of imperial power, narrating a version of what Eavan Boland calls the “distaff side” of history, a shift in perspective away from male-dominated historiography.  “A woman rages,” Silvia says, “against a history // she can’t touch.”

 

Obliterated from the historical record, and permitted entrée into “history” only by means of her body, Rhea Silvia exists, as Kang imagines her, in ambiguous relation to those imperial monuments with which Rome remembers itself, phallic “triumphal column[s]” which stand, as Silvia recognizes, only for “pure desire.”  Kang articulates this ambiguous relationship in a brilliant long-poem in the book’s second section, “Didactic of a Column with Helical Frieze,” based on Trajan’s Column in the Piazza Foro Traiano.  Among conquering warriors and generals addressing their troops, women show up only “sweating in the Roman sun, […] reading a history she can’t touch.”  “If I could see what it is,” Kang writes in appropriately ambiguous first-person, “I could / begin to describe my desire // to level it / the playing field.”  Yet the helical frieze depicts also a female figure who seems to be carving the column itself, somewhat like Escher’s Drawing Hands:

 

            woman with her hand

           

                                        where the column is

 

 beginning to describe her desire

                                        in block letters / in stone

 

 where the scenes entwine

                finding herself on a hill

 

                         looking down as if it could

                                         have been her

 

                         this whole Rome, that lost man

                                          and his beautiful address […]

 

What makes this woman’s ambition so striking, in Kang’s hands, is its impossibility, since for both her and observers the helical frieze “makes a body dizzy.”  “Circling the base,” Kang writes, “the eye cannot hope to read the figures at the top.”  Moving between myth and history, subject and object, figure and ground, “Didactic of a Column with Helical Frieze” is one of the most intriguing ekphrastic poems I have encountered in some time, vertiginous in its trompe-l’oeil imagery, beautifully ambivalent in its ethical take-aways.

 

Ironically, perhaps, the strongest parts of All Empires Must eschew the kind of chiseled, lapidary aesthetic described on Trajan’s Column; Kang is best not in her short, Niedecker-like stanzas, nor in the abbreviated Creeley-esque line, but in longer strophes and long poems, to which her ear seems finely attuned.  Likewise, a good editor would have trimmed much of the anaphora in the book; too many poems rely for their structure on repeated heuristics: “Say a wall and horse do meet, […] Say the horse is sweating,” or “If I had never seen Rome, […] if I had called the men to arms.”

 

On the other hand, it is possible to read such anaphora—enacting in linguistic form the circularity of the helical frieze—as representing formally an alternative historical structure, one proceeding not through linear progress, with its masculine telos, but through cyclical, gyre-like repetitions.

 

Kang suggests those repetitions when she reads the myth of Mars and Rhea Silvia as allegory for everyday contemporary experience, figuring their relationship as tempestuous office affair:

 

                                    I said yes and I meant it.  Yes recklessly with office door shut

or while his girlfriend was in Canada.  Later when I couldn’t ask his advice I

wondered about the limits

 

of questions and answers.  For instance What do you want? etc.  And in fact it

was posed to me as a hypothetical: If we

 

were to how would you want it?   I said From behind.  And then we did.

 

And that’s the difference between theory and practice.

 

More successfully than other debuts reviewed on this platform, Kang imagines mythology in and as "modern love," reading sexual and imperial urges against each other, excavating female agency in unlikely places—and that’s the difference between theory and practice.