West (poetry collection)

Last updated
West: A Translation
"West" by Paisley Rekdal book cover.png
Author Paisley Rekdal
Publisher Copper Canyon Press
Publication date
May 2, 2023
Pages176
ISBN 978-1556596568
Preceded byAppropriate: A Provocation 

West: A Translation is a 2023 poetry collection by Paisley Rekdal, published by Copper Canyon Press. [1] The book, along with its accompanying website, is a multimodal project about the transcontinental railroad in the United States and the broader history of Chinese Americans. Rekdal's 11th book, it was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry. [2]

Contents

Background

In 1869, the transcontinental railroad in the United States was completed, connecting both coasts of the country together. Countless Chinese American migrant workers participated in the construction of the rail project, mostly around the Sierra Nevada, in conditions that proved treacherous and fatal for many. [3]

As the Poet Laureate of Utah in 2018, Rekdal was asked to write a poem about the railroad for its 150th anniversary. [4] Instead, feeling a pressing need to address the gaps in the railroad's history, Rekdal endeavored to write a hybrid work of poems and essays that would become West: A Translation. [5]

Contents

In two sections—"West" and "Notes Toward an Untranslated Century"—the book tackles Chinese American history ranging from the transcontinental railroad to the Chinese Exclusion Act to the poetry of the Angel Island Immigration Station. In addition to prominently featuring the voices of those Rekdal considered underrepresented and dispossessed in the "archive" of history, it also features historical figures such as Brigham Young, Leland Stanford, Andrew Johnson, and countless others. [6] [4]

One issue Rekdal faced in putting together the book was the silence of the archive with regard to perspectives of the railroad which weren't well-documented or documented at all. Well-recorded perspectives allowed Rekdal more creative liberty in her poems, whereas scarcer materials meant Rekdal had to stay "extremely close to their stories, rhythms, diction, and pacing." [7] In the Georgia Review, Rekdal stated:

"Interestingly, the environment and Chinese railroad workers share something in common when it comes to the history of the Transcontinental: the lack of a voice. No letters or written records authored by Chinese railroad workers have yet been discovered, so our understanding of the Chinese experience on the Transcontinental is essentially imaginative, and often imagined by white authors." [8]

The book also comes with a website which provides visual poetry and further elaborates on the histories touched on by the book. [6] Rekdal had created the website out of a desire to bring "images and text together so that people would have a multi-sensory experience." [9] [10] The website can be accessed online but also through a QR code on the book's back flap.

Critical reception

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly concluded: "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." [11]

Critics lauded Rekdal's multimodal approach to an often forgotten and overlooked history. [12] The Poetry Foundation called the book "gorgeously designed". [6] Los Angeles Review of Books said "West is a book of ghosts—not the white-sheeted apparitions of the popular imagination but specters of the past that flicker imperceptibly in the present, shaping our lives in ways we cannot grapple with until we recognize them." [6] International Examiner stated that "The first half of West: A Translation is fascinating in showing the power of poetry and archival work as well as Rekdal’s prowess as a poet ... The second half is difficult to read but perhaps the difficulty is the point, how impressive and pressing can be the same, two halves of the same baggage." [13] Good River Review wrote, of the book, that "Astonishing in scope and intelligence, its ambitions are as vast as the nineteenth-century frontier and the dreams for American empire." [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kenneth Rexroth</span> American poet (1905–1982)

Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine. Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adélia Prado</span> Brazilian writer and poet (born 1935)

Adélia Luzia Prado Freitas is a Brazilian writer and poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forrest Gander</span> Poet, essayist, novelist, critic, translator (born 1956)

Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aimee Nezhukumatathil</span> American poet

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. She currently serves as poetry editor of Sierra Magazine and as professor of English in the University of Mississippi's MFA program, where she previously was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence in 2016-17. She has also taught at the Kundiman Retreat for Asian American writers. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband, Dustin Parsons, and their two sons.

The William Carlos Williams Award is given out by the Poetry Society of America for a poetry book published by a small press, non-profit, or university press.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carolyn Kizer</span> American writer (1925-2014)

Carolyn Ashley Kizer was an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scott Hightower</span> American poet

Scott Hightower is an American poet, teacher, and reviewer. He is the author of five books of poetry. His third, Part of the Bargain, won the 2004 Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets. He is a recipient of a Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for a translation from Spanish.

The Best American Poetry series consists of annual poetry anthologies, each containing seventy-five poems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copper Canyon Press</span> American independent non-profit literary publisher

Copper Canyon Press is an independent, non-profit small press, founded in 1972 by Sam Hamill, Tree Swenson, Bill O'Daly, and Jim Gautney, specializing exclusively in the publication of poetry. It is located in Port Townsend, Washington.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fady Joudah</span> Palestinian-American poet and physician (born 1971)

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet and physician. He is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for his collection of poems The Earth in the Attic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Sze</span> American poet (born 1950)

Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victoria Chang</span> American poet and childrens writer

Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic. She has experimented with different styles of writing, including writing obituaries for parts of her life, including her parents and herself, in Obit, letters in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and a Japanese form known as waka in The Trees Witness Everything. In all of her poems and books, Chang has several common themes: living as an Asian-American woman, depression, and dealing with loss and grief. She has also written two books for children.

Dan Gerber is an American poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregory Pardlo</span> American poet, writer, and professor (born 1968)

Gregory Pardlo is an American poet, writer, and professor. His book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and on National Public Radio. His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”

Troy Jollimore is a Canadian-American poet, philosopher, literary critic, and academic known for poetic writings.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paisley Rekdal</span> American poet

Paisley Rekdal is an American poet who is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays entitled The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate, as well as six books of poetry. For her work, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes in both 2009 and 2013, Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and several other awards from the state arts council. She has been recognized for her poems and essays in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series, and on National Public Radio, among others. She was also a recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets' Poets Laureate Fellowship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Connie Young Yu</span> Chinese American writer, historian, and lecturer

Connie Young Yu is a Chinese American writer, activist, historian, and lecturer.

Adam Lowe is a British writer, performer and publisher from Leeds, though he currently lives in Manchester. He is the UK's LGBT+ History Month Poet Laureate and was Yorkshire's Poet for 2012. He writes poetry, plays and fiction, and he occasionally performs as Beyonce Holes.

Shangyang Fang is a Chinese poet. Writing in both English and Chinese, he is the author of Burying the Mountain, a debut poetry collection published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. He has earned a Stegner Fellowship and attended the Michener Center for Writers. His name, Shangyang, refers to a mythological one-legged bird whose dance brought rain and flood.

References

  1. Rekdal, Paisley (2023). West: a translation. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press. ISBN   978-1-61932-277-6.
  2. Stewart, Sophia (September 15, 2023). "2023 National Book Award Longlists Announced". PublishersWeekly.com. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  3. Goh, Teow Lim (2023-06-12). "A Carefully Cultivated Loss: On Paisley Rekdal's "West"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  4. 1 2 3 Edwards, Lynnell (2024-04-02). "Empire's Scribe: A Review of Paisley Rekdal's WEST: A TRANSLATION". Good River Review. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  5. "Paisley Rekdal: Poet, Professor, Author". River Mouth Review. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  6. 1 2 3 4 "West: A Translation". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  7. Sakelaris, Isabelle (2023-12-08). "Paisley Rekdal Interview". Interlocutor. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  8. "Reimagining the Railroad's History: A Conversation between Paisley Rekdal and Julia H. Lee". 2023-03-15. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  9. Jansen, Steve (2024-03-01). "Paisley Rekdal Reimagines History in West: A Translation". Southwest Contemporary. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  10. Bernstein, Zach. "Other People's Voices" . Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  11. "West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal". www.publishersweekly.com. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  12. Michaelis, Sarah (April 1, 2023). "West: A Translation". Library Journal. Retrieved 2024-11-14.
  13. Chan, Justine (2024-09-08). "'West: A Translation' is an unflinching archival masterpiece". International Examiner. Retrieved 2024-11-14.