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Overview
National Book Award, 2023 Longlist * "Elegiac and shot through with righteous anger, this essential collection demands a national reckoning."--Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW* "A must-have for libraries." --Booklist, STARRED REVIEW"A remarkable collection offering history not typically told in textbooks."--Library Journal
Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, West: A Translation explores what unites and divides America, drawing a powerful, necessary connection between the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is West: A Translation--an unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays that draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad's completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained during the Chinese Exclusion Act, is a poem elegizing a detainee who committed suicide. As West translates this anonymous Chinese elegy character by character, what's left is a haunting narrative distilled through the history and lens of transcontinental railroad workers, and a sweeping exploration of the railroad's cultural impact on America. Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, West explores what unites and divides America, and how our ideas about American history creep forward, even as the nation itself constantly threatens to spiral back.West is accompanied by a website (www.westtrain.org) which features video poems and encourages self-exploration of the transcontinental railroad's history through an interactive, non-linear structure. Pairing this urgent book and innovative website, Rekdal masterfully challenges how histories themselves get written and disseminated. The result is a tour de force of resistance and resilience.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781556596568 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2023 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Sales rank: | 443,844 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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?