May
26
12:00am
May Poetry Book Club Presents Paisley Rekdal, author of West
By The Rumpus
Join us for an exclusive Rumpus Book Club conversation with Paisley Rekdal for her poetry collection West led by Rumpus Poetry Editor, Brian Spears & Copper Canyon Press Editor-in-Chief, Michael Wiegers.
About the May Book Club selection:
In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned by the Spike 150 Committee to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The result is “West: A Translation:” a hybrid collection of poems that respond to an anonymous Chinese poem carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained during the Chinese Exclusion Act. This poem, part of a dialogic pair written in Chinese, elegizes a fellow detainee who committed suicide at Angel Island. “West” translates this elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other transcontinental railroad workers’ histories, and through the railroad’s cultural impact on America. Through its multiple voices, literary forms and documents, “West” finally explores what unites and divides America, and how our ideas about American history crawl forward even while the nation itself constantly threatens to spiral backwards.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, including Nightingale, Appropriate: A Provocation, and, most recently, West: A Translation. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she is a distinguished professor.
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