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 proselytized 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 poems that flow from the prose stream are snapshots of the passing Zeitgeist as seen from the passenger window of an Amtrak train as it roars through nameless towns that vanish as quickly as camp smoke in the wind. Empire Builder is, in essence, a travelogue of subjectively recorded experience often in a jazzlike or free-associative manner.