Poetry. OTHER ROMES gathers together an eclectic range of influences—from Fellini films, to eating contests, Jesuit poetry, and jetliners—to confront the awkward but inevitable relationship between personal narratives and the larger public sphere. And like the title city that haunts much of this work, Mong refuses to settle on any one voice or form. Restrained at times as a Latin ode, or expansive as Whitman, these poems take erotic love and in-flight disaster through subtle, fissuring syllabics, strict sestinas, free verse, and more. The end result is an expansive collection, which as poet and critic David Baker remarks, demonstrates that "the privacy of the lyric world is part and parcel with the communal imagination."

Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA

Derek Mong's awards include The Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Choice Prize, Alehouse's Happy Hour Poetry Award, and two Hopwoods. His poems, translations, and prose have appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Courtgreen, and BREATHE: 101 CONTEMPORARY ODES. He holds an MFA from The University of Michigan and is currently a PhD candidate at Stanford University.

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