Based on two years living and researching in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Christopher Kempf's What Though the Field Be Lost uses the battlefield there as setting and subject for poetry that engages ongoing conversations about race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory in the United States.
With empathy and humility, Kempf reveals the overlapping planes of historical past and public present, integrating archival materials--language from monuments, soldiers' letters, and eyewitness accounts of the fighting--with reflections on present-day social and political unrest. Monument protests, police shootings, and heated battle reenactments expose the ambivalences and evasions involved in the consolidation of national (and nationalist) identity. As the book's title, an allusion to Milton's Satan, suggests, What Though the Field Be Lost shows that, though the Civil War may be over, the field at Gettysburg and all it stands for remain sharply contested. Shuttling between past and present, the personal and the public, What Though the Field Be Lost examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy.