Author Description

<b><br></b></p><b>National Book Award, </b><b>2023 </b><b>Longlist </b></p>* "Elegiac and shot through with righteous anger, this essential collection demands a national reckoning."--<i>Publishers Weekly</i>, STARRED REVIEW</p>* "A must-have for libraries." --Booklist, STARRED REVIEW</p>"A remarkable collection offering history not typically told in textbooks."--<i>Library Journal</i><br></p>Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, <i>West: A Translation</i><i> </i>explores what unites and divides America, drawing a powerful, necessary connection between the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the Chinese Exclusion Act.</p>In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is <i>West: A Translation</i>--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 <i>West</i> 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, <i>West </i>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.</p><i>West</i> is accompanied by a website (www.westtrain.org) which features video poems and encourages self-exploration of the transcontinental railroad's history through an