In The Diaspora Sonnets, Oliver de la Paz uses the traditional sonnet to eloquently invoke the perseverance and myth of the Filipino diaspora in America. Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation is an unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays that draws a powerful, necessary connection between the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943). Moderated by Eric Tran (Moth, Sugar, and Smoke).

Oliver de la Paz’s family’s search for a sense of “home” and boundless feelings of deracination are evocatively explored by award-winning poet de la Paz in this formally inventive collection of sonnets. The Diaspora Sonnets eloquently invokes the perseverance and bold possibilities of de la Paz’s displaced family as they strove for stability and belonging. The sonnet proves formally malleable as de la Paz breaks and rejoins its tradition throughout this collection, embarking on a broader conversation about what fits and how one adapts. A series of “Chain Migration” poems viscerally punctuate the sonnets, giving witness to the labor and sacrifice of the immigrant experience, as do a series of hauntingly beautiful pantoums. Written with the deft touch of a virtuoso and the compassion of a loving son, The Diaspora Sonnets powerfully captures the peculiar pangs of a diaspora “that has left and is forever leaving.” Longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry.

“There is no container more fitting to the conveyance of the nuanced sorrow of the permanent displacement from home, a word ‘ensnared with thorns,’ than the sonnet, certainly as it is practiced by Oliver de la Paz… The tenderness in these poems comes through in their ‘gradations of memory where one // belonged,’ and in their penetrating artfulness, itself a kind of love.”
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is West: 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, 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. Longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry.

“Through these poems, readers are asked to wrestle with the complex, layered histories of race, creed, class, and gender that are all too often overlooked in monolithic presentations of America’s past and present. Elegiac and shot through with righteous anger, this essential collection demands a national reckoning.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

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