The Empire Builder Chapbook is now available through the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
Empire Builder is the name of an Amtrak train route that stretches from Chicago to Seattle. Empire Builder is also the moniker bestowed upon James Jerome Hill, a railroad baron in the Gilded Age, who popularized the gospel of Commerce and Christianity.
The opening prose stream explores the historical and literary roots underpinning the philosophy of capitalist expansion and exploitation and its impact on Indigenous populations through absurdist conversations with figments of the traveler’s imagination.
The short poems that flow from the prose stream
are postcards from the passenger window of an Amtrak train as it roars through nameless towns that vanish as quickly as camp smoke in the wind.
