West A translation

In her commanding latest, Rekdal (Nightingale) incorporates various languages, historical documents, photographs, and other primary source texts. It reevaluates American history, linking the completion of the transcontinental railroad to the establishment of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which remained in effect from 1882 to 1943. Inspired by a poem carved into the Angel Island Immigration Station near San Francisco by an anonymous Chinese detainee, Rekdal "translates" the text character by character into a series of poems that reveal the hypocrisies and contradictions still prevalent in what it means to be "American" today. The collection opens with a poem following Abraham Lincoln's body on a funeral train in 1865 as it travels across seven states, asking: "Can you still believe in the promise of this union?" A later poem reimagines questions asked by immigration officials, reframing the humanity of Chinese immigrants: "What diseases of the heart/ do you carry? What country do you see/ when you think of your children?" Through these poems, readers are asked to wrestle with the complex, layered histories of race, creed, class, and gender that are all too often overlooked in monolithic presentations of America's past and present. Elegiac and shot through with righteous anger, this essential collection demands a national reckoning. (May)

The author of nonfiction (Appropriate: A Provocation) as well as verse (Nightingale), former Utah poet laureate Rekdal was commissioned in 2018 to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of completion of the U.S. transcontinental railroad. What results is a captivating, extensively researched book blending poetry and essays, told from the perspective of the railroad workers while focusing on the lives and treatment of Chinese migrants and the devastation to the environment during the building process. In particular, the collection links the railroad's completion to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882--1943) while probing an anonymous elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station that honored a detainee who died by suicide. The collection is accompanied by a thorough notes section at once lyrical, informative, and autobiographical as Rekdal, whose mother is Chinese American, explores her own family history. In the end, the railroad is emblematic of both possibility and oppression; expanding her work to explore the Great Migration, Rekdal comments, "What is freedom/but the power to choose/ where you won't die?/ What is a train/ but the self once yoked to terror loosed/ inside a force that glides/ on heat and steam?" VERDICT A remarkable collection offering history not typically told in textbooks; an accompanying website (westtrain.org) with video poems and historical images adds context.--Sarah Michaelis

回/Return If falling leaves return to roots, what grows when leaves cannot be gathered? What returns if not the body? What remains if not the soul? Who is to say these graves empty of their bones mean only loss, not that these men escaped death's hold entirely: they are not home, but they are not here, either, or have become so full of here we need another word than gone . So throw out the cormorant, its leg tied with silken ropes. Let it drag the air for memory. Over and over, as many times as you want. You can't snare what isn't missing. This country claimed their bodies. It never trapped their souls. 千/Thousand A thousand spades to clear the cuts. A thousand ropes to haul out redwoods. For the mountains, a thousand arms to scale the rocks, a thousand hands to lose in blasts. A thousand corpses frozen in the snow. A thousand bags of opium, oolong, rice mats. A thousand and a thousand and a thousand added to each payroll but not a single name. A thousand shards of pottery haloing the trestle. Someone's sketched a worker's face along the flip side of a telegram. He's four dollars a day, 35$ a month. His profile wreathes like smoke between the numbers. How many cairns did you say we passed outside Kelton? Translate these absences to bodies. Translate these bodies back to men. 思鄉/ Miss Home  Ways to die: blasting accident, derailment, boiler crack. Crushed between trains crossing in the night. Electrocution, bad food, heart attack. You can work yourself to death, a la John, a la Henry. Or you can stay at home, and die anyway: fist and noose, club, gun, knife in the back. Gossip. Sharecropping. Bottle of rum with gas-soaked rag. What is freedom but the power to choose where you won't die? What is a train but the self once yoked to terror loosed inside a force that glides on heat and steam? You're so far from Mississippi , the UP boss said when we hit Rock Springs. Don't you miss your home? Miss home? I told him. I'm hoping to miss it entirely. 有識/ Have Knowledge Immigration questionnaire given to Chinese claiming to be former US residents, or for Chinese entering the country during the Chinese Exclusion Act. Have you ridden in a streetcar? Can you describe the taste of bread? Where are the joss houses located in the city? Do Jackson Street and Dupont run in a circle or a line, what is the fruit your mother ate before she bore you, how many letters a year do you receive from your father? Of which material is his ancestral hall now built? How many water buffalo does your uncle own? Do you love him? Do you hate her? What kind of bird sang at your parents' wedding? What are the birth dates for each of your cousins; did your brother die from starvation, work, or murder? Do you know the price of tea? Have you ever touched a stranger's face as he slept? Did it snow the year you first wintered in the desert? How much weight is a bucket and a hammer? Which store is opposite your grandmother's? Did you sleep with that man for money? Did you sleep with that man for love? Name the color and number of all your mother's dresses. Now your village's rivers. What diseases of the heart do you carry? What country do you see when you think of your children? Does your sister ever write? In which direction does her front door face? How many steps did you take when you finally left her? How far did you walk before you looked back? Excerpted from West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.