West
A Translation
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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 (1882-1943).
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her commanding latest, Rekdal (Nightingale) incorporates various languages, historical documents, photographs, and other primary source texts.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.
