""What Though the Field Be Lost" uses the battlefield there as setting and subject for poetry that engages with ongoing conversations about race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory in the United States. With compassion and empathy, as well as humor and humility, Kempf stitches documentary details-incorporating language from monuments, soldiers' letters, and eyewitness accounts of the battle-alongside personal moments and reflections that capture the overlapping planes of historical past and public present. Milton's famously charismatic Satan offers a model of the allure in which evil can be veiled, as Kempf investigates the ambivalences and evasions involved in any understanding of national, or nationalist, identity. The author's experiences living in Gettysburg are read, in turn, against Milton's account of Adam and Eve, the book's title alluding to the fact that, though the Civil War itself may be over, the field of Gettysburg remains contested. Throughout, Kempf intercuts historical materials with references to contemporary social and political unrest, including monument protests, police shootings, and often-heated battle reenactments. Shuttling deftly between past and present, "What Though the Field Be Lost" examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy"--