West: A Translation

The author of nonfiction (Appropriate: A Provocation) as well as verse (Nightingale), former Utah poet laureate Rekdal was commissioned in 2018 to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of completion of the U.S. transcontinental railroad. What results is a captivating, extensively researched book blending poetry and essays, told from the perspective of the railroad workers while focusing on the lives and treatment of Chinese migrants and the devastation to the environment during the building process. In particular, the collection links the railroad’s completion to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943) while probing an anonymous elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station that honored a detainee who died by suicide. The collection is accompanied by a thorough notes section at once lyrical, informative, and autobiographical as Rekdal, whose mother is Chinese American, explores her own family history. In the end, the railroad is emblematic of both possibility and oppression; expanding her work to explore the Great Migration, Rekdal comments, “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?”