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West: A Translation
National Book Award 2023, Longlist Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, 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 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 ( ) 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.
In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is 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 ( ) 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.
176 pages, Paperback
First published May 2, 2023
12 people are currently reading
361 people want to read
About the author
Paisley Rekdal
25 books96 followersRekdal grew up in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of a Chinese American mother and a Norwegian father. She earned a BA from the University of Washington, an MA from the University of Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of the poetry collections A Crash of Rhinos (2000), Six Girls Without Pants (2002), and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (2007) as well as the book of essays The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000).
In reviewing The Invention of the Kaleidoscope for Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson observed that it’s “the razor’s edge that always accompanies eros that makes the poems of Paisley Rekdal fresh, intense and ultimately irresistible.” Rekdal’s work grapples with issues of race, sexuality, myth, and identity while often referencing contemporary culture.
Rekdal has been honored with a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah.
In reviewing The Invention of the Kaleidoscope for Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson observed that it’s “the razor’s edge that always accompanies eros that makes the poems of Paisley Rekdal fresh, intense and ultimately irresistible.” Rekdal’s work grapples with issues of race, sexuality, myth, and identity while often referencing contemporary culture.
Rekdal has been honored with a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
December 12, 2023
Written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal’s “West: A Translation” is certainly one of the most interesting poetry books I have read this year. Whether it is successful or not is more a matter of taste than effort, and while it isn’t the kind of poetry I would normally enjoy, I found the meticulous scholarship included to expand my experience of the book immensely.
One of my favorite essays of this year was a piece published in Artforum critiquing the rise of research-based art in contemporary art museums. With the rise of professionalization and graduate programs, fledgling artists who attend MFAs and PhDs in studio art now immerse themselves in collecting, indexing, and historizing artifacts to produce various ends. I go to museums often and have often disliked these pieces - more drawn to craft, I balk at reading numerous placards trying to weave links between collected objects as much as I detest sitting down to watch video art on a cathode tv. I don’t make the time for it, and have rarely felt rewarded by this kind of art in a museum setting. The author of this essay goes on to describe numerous weakness in these kinds of work ranging from the privilege of attending these programs to the disorderliness of their contents. As a viewer, I frankly just find them boring.
I will make an exception to this same idea playing out in a book format. I don’t have to stand in a museum or pay for a ticket, and have all the time in the world to move through it. It’s what made Jenny Odell’s book on the attention economy successful for me, although I’m unsure I would appreciate her art in person.
I bring this all up to say why Rekdal’s book, which I normally wouldn’t like, was so successful for me. I do not know a lot about her process when she created these poems, and I suspect that many of these were found works reappropriated and rearranged at the author’s will. That I couldn’t tell which was which was slightly frustrating to me. Some of the poems are simply lists of names: towns that the UP railroad passed through or tribes displaced by the emergence of the railroad. As a historical document, I suppose these names could be interesting, but ultimately they are just points of data that may or may not enhance the experience of reading her poems. But when the poetry hits (or slaps, as she mentions in the back half), they really work well. I come to poetry for craft, and you can tell that, for whatever was or was not cribbed language, a great deal of skill went into creating this.
Each of the poems in this collection are based on Chinese characters written on the wall of a detention cell in Angel Island Immigration Station. The word is expanded to house the narratives of a cast of characters across racial, ethnic, gender, class, and time itself, to tell the story of the world around the railroad. It is ambitious, but the essays in the back elucidating all of these historical items is what tied the book together for me. She doesn’t just lay out what she found but analyzes, interrogates, and questions what she has created.
It so happens that earlier this year, I visited the location where the transcontinental railroad connected in Utah. I was only passing through to see the Spiral Jetty, a place I had often dreamed of visiting, and regrettably paid little attention to the historic significance of this site. Unfortunately I won’t be headed back to Utah any time soon to explore that, but I am grateful that Rekdal has created a work of art around the region she inhabits, even if it is, as she claims, to be a scribe of empire. It’s good work!
One of my favorite essays of this year was a piece published in Artforum critiquing the rise of research-based art in contemporary art museums. With the rise of professionalization and graduate programs, fledgling artists who attend MFAs and PhDs in studio art now immerse themselves in collecting, indexing, and historizing artifacts to produce various ends. I go to museums often and have often disliked these pieces - more drawn to craft, I balk at reading numerous placards trying to weave links between collected objects as much as I detest sitting down to watch video art on a cathode tv. I don’t make the time for it, and have rarely felt rewarded by this kind of art in a museum setting. The author of this essay goes on to describe numerous weakness in these kinds of work ranging from the privilege of attending these programs to the disorderliness of their contents. As a viewer, I frankly just find them boring.
I will make an exception to this same idea playing out in a book format. I don’t have to stand in a museum or pay for a ticket, and have all the time in the world to move through it. It’s what made Jenny Odell’s book on the attention economy successful for me, although I’m unsure I would appreciate her art in person.
I bring this all up to say why Rekdal’s book, which I normally wouldn’t like, was so successful for me. I do not know a lot about her process when she created these poems, and I suspect that many of these were found works reappropriated and rearranged at the author’s will. That I couldn’t tell which was which was slightly frustrating to me. Some of the poems are simply lists of names: towns that the UP railroad passed through or tribes displaced by the emergence of the railroad. As a historical document, I suppose these names could be interesting, but ultimately they are just points of data that may or may not enhance the experience of reading her poems. But when the poetry hits (or slaps, as she mentions in the back half), they really work well. I come to poetry for craft, and you can tell that, for whatever was or was not cribbed language, a great deal of skill went into creating this.
Each of the poems in this collection are based on Chinese characters written on the wall of a detention cell in Angel Island Immigration Station. The word is expanded to house the narratives of a cast of characters across racial, ethnic, gender, class, and time itself, to tell the story of the world around the railroad. It is ambitious, but the essays in the back elucidating all of these historical items is what tied the book together for me. She doesn’t just lay out what she found but analyzes, interrogates, and questions what she has created.
It so happens that earlier this year, I visited the location where the transcontinental railroad connected in Utah. I was only passing through to see the Spiral Jetty, a place I had often dreamed of visiting, and regrettably paid little attention to the historic significance of this site. Unfortunately I won’t be headed back to Utah any time soon to explore that, but I am grateful that Rekdal has created a work of art around the region she inhabits, even if it is, as she claims, to be a scribe of empire. It’s good work!
March 25, 2024
wow. holy shit
February 26, 2025
i wasn’t sure about the explanations at first, but ended up loving the lyricism of her prose. so so so beautiful and also very heartbreaking … need to lock in to my mandarin
May 2, 2025
125 ‘The building of the transcontinental is a paired event, just as the Angel Island poem is a paired poem. But though I gesture at both events, I have not included both poems. The reader may sense this exclusion. And yet, what is a translation except a carefully cultivated loss? Into this absence, I lean and angle my mirror.’
129 ‘the Chinese seemed never to write about themselves. Here is the reality of the record: not a single letter, not a sole diary entry written by a chinese worker has been found. This is not to say there are no records. What is a quote but a fragment of history [...] Much can be made of any document, and its language of conformity or deviance, by the reader written into or out of it.’
140 ‘This is a list of the western tribal lands between Ogden and Sacramento that the transcontinental crosses. I’d first imagined this as a poem composed of documents written by members of these nations [...] In the absence of specific voices, then, I present this general document that suggests the specific. Which is to say, I recognize that in writing about the railroad, every inclusion means exclusion.’
155 ‘The railroad, from its inception, was conceived of as a unifying, figural community whose own mechanics also exposed the literal limits of these bonds. We share in common though we cannot always see in common. I, too, am a divided author: I interrupt this text with fact. I interrupt it, too, with imagination. What is factual I express within the limits of poetry, while what is poetic I locate within the limits of the real. My poems may be constructions of language then, but they also reveal the uneasy contact between bodies through time [...] The railroad as metaphor insists we belong to one another through the work of nation-building while the poem insists we belong to one another because we are human. In both cases this link is based on labor, whether of performance and writing, or of money. Perhaps the elegy, too, is labor. And the best laborers, of course, are meant to be invisible [...] “Maybe it isn’t outrageous to start imagining books solely or mostly made of acknowledgements,” Garza writes. For who is it, really, who made the writing of this book possible? Bring the background into foreground, and that is the poem. You may assemble the notes as you like.’
129 ‘the Chinese seemed never to write about themselves. Here is the reality of the record: not a single letter, not a sole diary entry written by a chinese worker has been found. This is not to say there are no records. What is a quote but a fragment of history [...] Much can be made of any document, and its language of conformity or deviance, by the reader written into or out of it.’
140 ‘This is a list of the western tribal lands between Ogden and Sacramento that the transcontinental crosses. I’d first imagined this as a poem composed of documents written by members of these nations [...] In the absence of specific voices, then, I present this general document that suggests the specific. Which is to say, I recognize that in writing about the railroad, every inclusion means exclusion.’
155 ‘The railroad, from its inception, was conceived of as a unifying, figural community whose own mechanics also exposed the literal limits of these bonds. We share in common though we cannot always see in common. I, too, am a divided author: I interrupt this text with fact. I interrupt it, too, with imagination. What is factual I express within the limits of poetry, while what is poetic I locate within the limits of the real. My poems may be constructions of language then, but they also reveal the uneasy contact between bodies through time [...] The railroad as metaphor insists we belong to one another through the work of nation-building while the poem insists we belong to one another because we are human. In both cases this link is based on labor, whether of performance and writing, or of money. Perhaps the elegy, too, is labor. And the best laborers, of course, are meant to be invisible [...] “Maybe it isn’t outrageous to start imagining books solely or mostly made of acknowledgements,” Garza writes. For who is it, really, who made the writing of this book possible? Bring the background into foreground, and that is the poem. You may assemble the notes as you like.’
May 27, 2023
This amazing book is a brilliant combination of scholarship and poetry. Taking as inspiration the words of a poem carved into the walls of an immigration station on the West Coast in the 19th century, it explores the role of the dispossessed who built the transcontinental railroad. Rekdal accompanies the poems with Notes at the end of the book that explore her personal experience and her deep research to try and uncover the experience of the Chinese in particular, which laborers themselves left no written record.
She expands that into a magnificent picture of all who built and worked upon the railroad: Chinese and Irish on the transcontinental, but also brilliantly working in the Great Migration and the Black Pullman porters. It captures the power imbalance between the despised immigrants and slaves who built so much of the U.S. in phrases and images of brilliant selection.
While there is much focus on the Chinese and then the Irish in the building of the transcontinental railroad, as a southerner the phrase from the Note on the poem "Bitterness" struck hard: "slavery is the sleeper over which the nation runs. " The poem "You" is a deep and detailed look at the Black Pullman Porters of the railroads.
She touches not only upon the immigrant builders of the modernizing nation, but also upon the landscape through which they blasted, dug, quarried and laid the road. "Lament" captures the tragedy of giant redwoods taken down for railroad ties, or sleepers.
In addition to the notes, the books contains photographs of the railroad, its builders, and the landscape that perfectly complement it.
This is a book of great beauty and depth which every American should read, and which will probably be banned from Florida schools.
She expands that into a magnificent picture of all who built and worked upon the railroad: Chinese and Irish on the transcontinental, but also brilliantly working in the Great Migration and the Black Pullman porters. It captures the power imbalance between the despised immigrants and slaves who built so much of the U.S. in phrases and images of brilliant selection.
While there is much focus on the Chinese and then the Irish in the building of the transcontinental railroad, as a southerner the phrase from the Note on the poem "Bitterness" struck hard: "slavery is the sleeper over which the nation runs. " The poem "You" is a deep and detailed look at the Black Pullman Porters of the railroads.
She touches not only upon the immigrant builders of the modernizing nation, but also upon the landscape through which they blasted, dug, quarried and laid the road. "Lament" captures the tragedy of giant redwoods taken down for railroad ties, or sleepers.
In addition to the notes, the books contains photographs of the railroad, its builders, and the landscape that perfectly complement it.
This is a book of great beauty and depth which every American should read, and which will probably be banned from Florida schools.
November 7, 2023
What an indictment of the robber barons who built the Transcontinental Railroad across the United States in the late 19th Century. Those whose lives were sacrificed to lay those tracks are remembered here, and the criminality of the murderous capitalists is described in great detail like a warrant. The accompanying essays read like affidavits. The fascinating illustrations and photographs invoke the dead like witnesses to hold the living accountable.
“At the 2018 conference for the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association, I take audio recordings of conferees saying one of three sentences: ‘This is the sound of a train’; ‘We do not ride in the railroad, it rides upon us’; and ‘We cannot count all the dead.’” —“This” in “Notes Toward an Untranslated Country: An Essay,” p. 146
“The train both unites and divides: it is the deepest, purest, most powerful fantasy of America. The work of the railroad is the work of empire, and for America to rise again and again, it must reinvest in its fantasy of itself as renewable, progressive, flexible. We are all servants of empire one way or another; I do not exclude myself in this. The extravagance of this poem I have produced reveals that I, too, am empire’s scribe. That in my attempt to critique the achievement I have also celebrated it; that it would be dishonest not to celebrate what inspired, at its root, a kind of wonder. For if I do not choose, also, to commemorate, do I further erase the workers? I refuse to abandon all fantasies of my nation. The railroad is built of words as much as steel.” —“Homeward Facing” in “Notes Toward an Untranslated Country: An Essay,” p. 158
Favorite Poems:
“Learn”
“Sad”
“Lament”
“Body”
“Thousand”
“Miss Home”
“Vainly”
“Homeward Facing”
“Soil”
“Know”
“Your”
“Heart”
“Dead”
“At the 2018 conference for the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association, I take audio recordings of conferees saying one of three sentences: ‘This is the sound of a train’; ‘We do not ride in the railroad, it rides upon us’; and ‘We cannot count all the dead.’” —“This” in “Notes Toward an Untranslated Country: An Essay,” p. 146
“The train both unites and divides: it is the deepest, purest, most powerful fantasy of America. The work of the railroad is the work of empire, and for America to rise again and again, it must reinvest in its fantasy of itself as renewable, progressive, flexible. We are all servants of empire one way or another; I do not exclude myself in this. The extravagance of this poem I have produced reveals that I, too, am empire’s scribe. That in my attempt to critique the achievement I have also celebrated it; that it would be dishonest not to celebrate what inspired, at its root, a kind of wonder. For if I do not choose, also, to commemorate, do I further erase the workers? I refuse to abandon all fantasies of my nation. The railroad is built of words as much as steel.” —“Homeward Facing” in “Notes Toward an Untranslated Country: An Essay,” p. 158
Favorite Poems:
“Learn”
“Sad”
“Lament”
“Body”
“Thousand”
“Miss Home”
“Vainly”
“Homeward Facing”
“Soil”
“Know”
“Your”
“Heart”
“Dead”
October 7, 2024
West: A Translation is utterly transporting. It is a book of poetry and essays mediating on the railroad and the Chinese, Black, Irish, and indigenous labor upon which it rides, capturing a geography of race and interrelationships, and a particularly American outlook.
Rekdal relies on a archival photography, letters, journals, speeches, guides, and tilts these into poems of sharp emphasis. I learned and thought a great deal as I was reading, and turned often to research to see confirmed the unsettling events and language from thought, culture, and industry leaders.
The poems are powerful, beautiful, and densely evocative, each titled after a word in a poem from an Angel Island suicide.
I was excited, coming through these, to then come to the section of essays that, one by one, speak to each poem. The essays themselves sometimes spelled out the historical and personal background related to the poem, and always made their own impacts felt separately, at times directly, at times in narrative effect. The essays returned me to every poem, which unclosed themselves in new, rich ways.
Throughout, Rekdal's own presence and subjectivity as a poet and historian are laid before us in its own complicated relationship to subjects already muted and tossed like timber.
In the essay accompanying the poem "You," Rekdal speaks to the larger project: "The railroad as metaphor insists we belong to one another through the work of nation-building while the poem insists we belong to one another because we are human. In both cases this link is based on labor, whether of performance and writing, or money" (155).
Rekdal relies on a archival photography, letters, journals, speeches, guides, and tilts these into poems of sharp emphasis. I learned and thought a great deal as I was reading, and turned often to research to see confirmed the unsettling events and language from thought, culture, and industry leaders.
The poems are powerful, beautiful, and densely evocative, each titled after a word in a poem from an Angel Island suicide.
I was excited, coming through these, to then come to the section of essays that, one by one, speak to each poem. The essays themselves sometimes spelled out the historical and personal background related to the poem, and always made their own impacts felt separately, at times directly, at times in narrative effect. The essays returned me to every poem, which unclosed themselves in new, rich ways.
Throughout, Rekdal's own presence and subjectivity as a poet and historian are laid before us in its own complicated relationship to subjects already muted and tossed like timber.
In the essay accompanying the poem "You," Rekdal speaks to the larger project: "The railroad as metaphor insists we belong to one another through the work of nation-building while the poem insists we belong to one another because we are human. In both cases this link is based on labor, whether of performance and writing, or money" (155).
February 21, 2024
At the risk of writing a very pretentious review, I can't help but compare this book to Julian Saporiti's No-No Boy project. Saporiti spins stories of the Asian experience in American history into catchy folk songs, while Rekdal turns similar stories into poetry. The poems can certainly be read and appreciated on their own, but the accompanying (very short) essays for each one added scholarly context while in no way detracting from their beauty. Though it's an uncomfortable beauty. The building of the transcontinental railroad was not a happy time, despite what my high school history books may have said back in the 90s. Rekdal's poems do not make this ugly period in American history more palatable, but they do add a layer of emotional depth that a straightforward history essay could not accomplish.
October 5, 2023
Paisley Rekdal has created a wonderful book of poems and material about the creation of the railroad and the racism aimed at the Chinese immigrants (as well as the Irish). Rekdal does an excellent job of allowing a wide range of voices and perspectives in the poem so that this feels like a historical document and book fo poetry. The problem with the book (and why I give it three stars) is that it ends with 46 pages of VERY LONG notes for the poems. Not only is this a lot of notes, but the notes are huge blocks of texts printed in a particularly uninviting manner. I would have had these notes at the end of each poem. Separated from the poems, I was often have to return to the poems to remember what Rekdahl was referencing in her notes.
January 15, 2024
4.75 Incredibly good collection, speaking to the various American people (Native American, Asian American, Black, etc.) who were involved with, exploited by, and harmed in the making of the American railroad. The railroad as a symbol was complex and interesting. Really a great collection.
A snippet from “Miss Home”:
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.
A snippet from “Miss Home”:
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.
August 2, 2023
Read this if you’re interested in actual American history. Read this as a companion piece to Howard Zinn or Ronald Takaki. Read the essays (in the back) plus their accompany poems (in the front) and then go to the book’s web site (!!) for accompany videos. This project is a tour de force and I definitely feel like I got to experience so many different perspectives through it!
Another book from my The Rumpus poetry subscription, one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself, right up there with prescription sunglasses and a cleaning lady.
Another book from my The Rumpus poetry subscription, one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself, right up there with prescription sunglasses and a cleaning lady.
October 8, 2023
A book to be reckoned with. This is a collection of poems and essays commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad and Rekdal did a beautiful job reconstructing all facets of history to bring us this all encompassing work.
I read it cover to cover, not realizing that the poems each corresponded with an essay. My method still worked fine but I probably would have read each poem and essay together. Then again, that would have involved an excessive amount of flipping back and forth.
I read it cover to cover, not realizing that the poems each corresponded with an essay. My method still worked fine but I probably would have read each poem and essay together. Then again, that would have involved an excessive amount of flipping back and forth.
November 19, 2023
This book is a poetry book about the building of the railroad in the US told from the perspective of the Chinese men that were building it. I thought that the poems were really good and got their point across. After the poems there was a paragraph to a page long that explained each poem. I didn't realize this until I read all of the poems. I wish that I had knew it beforehand, so that I could've read the poem and then read about it. I think that I would've gotten. more from it.
I give it 4.5 stars
I give it 4.5 stars
December 31, 2023
This is a remarkable book. The poems come out of deep research into the history of the transcontinental railroad and the history of the west, and bring to life characters and events from the past. But the book really takes off when you get to the notes. You end up reading the whole thing twice. The end-notes for each poem should be read in order - later notes refer back to earlier notes, and together they form a beautiful essay. This book reverses the expectation that the lyric poems will be personal, and the end-notes will be academic. Here, the end-notes are the most personal part.
December 12, 2024
I found Rekdal in a poets.org post - it was a 2024 poem in the form of a pantoum. Lovely, singsong quality. This collection does not contain any pantoums, but it does contain portraits of hardworking, rough people along the transcontinental railroad. Lots of emigrants working intensely physical jobs, often mistreated - sometimes speaking after they are dead. You can follow the material from a website www.westtrain.org. The notes that follow the poetry are pieces of American history that are seldom taught but should never be forgotten.
August 3, 2023
What a spectacular collection! I loved this collection as the author reflects on her Chinese heritage (particularly in this country - working on the railroad). The notes in the back on each poem and what is behind it - are wonderful and help make things clear that I hadn’t quite seen. A wonderful, wonderful, wise, collection.
November 8, 2024
i liked this project but only really liked three of the poems as poems. maybe poems don't have to be liked as poems. i liked lament, soil, dead, and the translation at the end. sorry for my aesthetic constrictions. but my objection is not that the poem works in a way i had not anticipated (backwards, recondite); more so that the poems were capable of more but did not take it
September 27, 2025
Read for a class this semester, very fucking upsetting so I kind of dreaded reading it each time but like. it's talking about reality. Well-crafted poems, I find that they sink in better and are more thoroughly appreciated when you have someone to bounce interpretations off of rather than reading it alone.
January 10, 2024
Literally in love with this book. It covers the development of the American frontier from the (mostly) imagined perspectives of different people who were exploited or otherwise involved. 10/10 could not recommend more.
August 20, 2024
An outstanding collection of research at times carved into poetic form. The injustice towards minorities during the pilgrimage west while building a railway is explained in detail after detail. An absolutely colossal undertaking and crafted with care.
December 28, 2024
Just remarkable work. Poetry about the transcontinental railroad and endnotes serving as an essay collection about history, identity, and art, Rekdal translates the experiences of the construction into a moving meditation that’s placed in history and art’s intersection.
November 6, 2023
the first 50 pages were REALLY good. but then they got repetitive. also, the poems didn’t allow room for interpretation because the notes told you what was being said.
December 28, 2023
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗
Wow — what an absolutely spectacular read.
Wow — what an absolutely spectacular read.
August 6, 2024
I did not understand this too well but i think it was probably very good
September 4, 2024
Complex combination of poetry and history, telling the story(s) of immigration centered on the building of the transcontinental (U.S.) railroad.
January 3, 2025
4.5 stars; this was a stunning book that did a lot of work I haven't seen before in documentary poetics about the West. I wanted this book to be three times as big.
April 2, 2025
Chilling and beautiful
June 27, 2025
This is the magnificent poem that Utah’s poet laureate wrote for the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railway.
June 30, 2024
National Book Award for Poetry Longlist 2023
Rekdal is a former poet laureate of Utah, and has received many awards and honors for her poetry.
This book grew out of a poetry commission. West focuses on trains in America—specifically the building of them by imported labor (Chinese, Irish, Italian) and the related Chinese Exclusion Act; she also looks at staff of trains (from black porters in the south and east to Native laborers in the west , the land grants given to railroads), Angel Island, Leland Stanford, and the myths of railroads in America.
But this collection is built around a Chinese poem etched into a wall at the Angel Island detention center. There is also a short essay to go with each poem, collected in the back of the book. I thought these were fascinating and necessary to understand the points she is making.
There is also a QR code on the back flap, which leads to readings, more photos, and a full translation of that original etched poem.
It feels wrong to call this a poetry book—it is really a much larger project. History, research, photography, readings, multimedia. It is quite the accomplishment and it’s a bit hard to wrap my brain around the entire thing!
Rekdal is a former poet laureate of Utah, and has received many awards and honors for her poetry.
This book grew out of a poetry commission. West focuses on trains in America—specifically the building of them by imported labor (Chinese, Irish, Italian) and the related Chinese Exclusion Act; she also looks at staff of trains (from black porters in the south and east to Native laborers in the west , the land grants given to railroads), Angel Island, Leland Stanford, and the myths of railroads in America.
But this collection is built around a Chinese poem etched into a wall at the Angel Island detention center. There is also a short essay to go with each poem, collected in the back of the book. I thought these were fascinating and necessary to understand the points she is making.
There is also a QR code on the back flap, which leads to readings, more photos, and a full translation of that original etched poem.
It feels wrong to call this a poetry book—it is really a much larger project. History, research, photography, readings, multimedia. It is quite the accomplishment and it’s a bit hard to wrap my brain around the entire thing!
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