In 2018, Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental's completion. The result is West: A Translation, a hybrid collection of poems and lyric essays that respond to an anonymous Chinese poem carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station where Chinese migrants to the U.S. 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 railroad workers' histories, and through the railroad's cultural impact on America. Through its multiple voices, literary forms and visual documents, West explores what unites and divides America, and how our ideas about American history crawl forward, even as the nation itself threatens to spiral backwards.
Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry
Winner of the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Prize
Finalist for the 2024 Reading the West Poetry Prize
NPR's "Books We Love 2023" Selection
Library Journal's Best Poetry of 2023
Starred Booklist review
Starred Publisher's Weekly review
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Pick, May 2023
The Millions "Must-Read Poetry," Spring 2023
Utah's Great Reads from Great Places selection,
National Book Festival 2023, Library of Congress
West is accompanied by a website, whose interactive, non-linear structure allows readers to compose their own translation of the Chinese elegy.
MEDIA: Poetry International interview, The Rumpus conversation with Rodrigo Toscano, The Georgia Review conversation with Julia H. Lee, Library Journal, Poetry, Enjambments for the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Foundation: Poetry Off the Shelf, LitHub, Poets & Writers, Los Angeles Review of Books, Fence Digital, Check Your Shelves Podcast, Interlocutor, "Race and the Railroad."