Mia Kang

All Empires Must

All Empires Must weaves in and out of Rome, taken as a figure for empire, ruin, and the seductions of both. An abstracted narrative concerns the fortunes of Rhea Silvia, the mythical mother of Romulus and Remus, whose story is either a romance or a romantic violation; in any case, she's dead. In these sometimes meditative, sometimes schematic poems, the desire for contact with a place, a past, or a person (including the self) is always complicated by boundaries and overdetermined by power. Language, then, becomes an austere pleasure. Unflinchingly, All Empires Must takes the measure of harm, without promise of repair.    

Cover design: Beth Ford
ISBN: 978-1-950404-16-2
Paperback: $18
Publication date: April 15, 2025

Mia Kang (she/her) is the author of City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020) and the winner of the 2023 Airlie Prize for All Empires Must (Airlie Press, 2025). Her poems appear in Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, wildness, and more. Named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest, Mia has received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as residencies from Millay Arts and the University of the Arts. Mia holds a PhD in the history of art from Yale University. She lives in Philadelphia. 

Praise for All Empires Must

“Must’ announces an irrevocable fate and/or introduces an order, being synonymous with the verb for “command” in Latin, imperare, which is closely related to the root of empire. All Empires Must is a brilliant collection of persona poems whose rigor and tautness conceals their complexity. Engaging the speculative, art and architecture, and feminist critique, Mia Kang’s countertexts on the founding of Rome shift power dynamics and imagine alternate scenarios begging questions such as: Must history and myth, its mirror image, repeat themselves? Must so-called scenes of invention keep involving violations, of women, of the land and of its peoples? In probing empire, they blaze paths for different imperatives.” —Mónica de la Torre

“Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome’––all cardinal vectors lead to that patch of land where the public play of civic life makes an Empire. But what if we could risk being tender of that rule? All Empires Must, Mia Kang begins, so we can know ourselves: we are ruled (‘I was a ruled body,’ she writes’) in the continuous imperative of the present. In Kang’s devising, language yields structure, builds walls, creating in itself another Rome. She hollows out Empire's architectural function, through ekphrastic argument and ease of surface, because we could also put together our objection: ‘Violence gives us // a choice: my love, / is your future / worth it?’ Tough in its lyricism, savvy in vernacular, form and ambition, Kang’s book is unforgettable. —Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

In her brilliant debut, Mia Kang ponders and parses the Roman Empire—with its walls and conquests, artworks and origin myths—sifting the ruins for clues as to how to live, grieve, and speak in the present. Like all the best poetry collections, this is a book that revises itself as it proceeds; in its second half, we understand the early (marvelous) ekphrases and persona poems as efforts to make sense of a complicated relationship and the impossibly reductive task of narrating it in verse. With rare rigor and poignancy, All Empires Must animates trenchant dilemmas about power, patriarchy, and loss, culminating in a document of ‘structural conditions / made visible,’ whose every line offers up ‘new ways not to arrive.’ —Maggie Millner

Excerpt from All Empires Must

Civitas

Acts of love have
material effects. For a woman

tending the sacred fire, these include
the risk of becoming

an extinguisher
of flames essential

to civic life. It is a burden
to put out

what others hold as central
to faith in coherence. Acts of faith

have material effects—a Vestal
Virgin touched by encounter

must be buried alive,
a beautiful metaphor

for shame itself, which squirms
even under all that dirt. Thus, the dead

learn too late
that devotion should be

unidirectional, a straight line
from here to suffocation. Love must not

bleed at the edges, must not meet
others in the banal spaces

of civil life. It is a burden
to personify. If Vesta’s hearth is the site

of the sacred, its material effects
are destruction: burning, consumption,

constant hunger
to end wood. Acts

of destruction have
fantasmatic effects. For a body

surviving encounter, these include
civic life, shame;

the risk of being
a proxy—tender

of the hearth belonging
to the public, by way

of the goddess, who embodies a dream
of faith in coherence. Material effects

extinguish themselves, eventually,
as when a woman

touched in the correct way
undoes the burden

of love and puts out, taking
the goddamn city in and under.