By now, the popular vision of the Old West from Hollywood and pulp paperbacks—the white and ruggedly handsome cowboys with their shootouts and skirmishes with Native American tribes who attacked the nice settlers for no reason whatsoever—has gained some much-needed complexity. But the history of westward exploration, expansion, colonization, and modernization is multifaceted with a far greater array of demographics than tends to be represented in fiction. In Paisley Rekdal’s latest, West: A Translation, the former Utah Poet Laureat instead deploys poetry and nonfiction to give a little more nuance to the seemingly familiar time and place.
Unless I blinked and missed it, there are no cowpokes in these pages. Rekdal’s focus is more on the railroad era and beyond, especially on the backs broken to build it. Many of those bruised bodies were from Chinese immigrants, and others emigrated across the Pacific to support those workers or otherwise find opportunity in this radical new world. The tension of the West’s need for those workers and the Chinese Exclusion Act preventing their entry is a rich vein Rekdal mines with poems based on translations of their writings and other accounts. Other poems look at harsh labor conditions for women, people of color, and those who didn’t strike it quite as rich as they had planned to.
The poems are often sparse and sometimes obtuse—sometimes only lists of, say, Native American tribes affected by the railroad, towns of historical import, or bird species that migrate over an area, that give less a narrative and more a macro piece to the puzzle. Nearly fifty pages of notes, however, are included to help flesh out each one. Rather than simply contextualize or explain the source of the poems, these notes are often themselves little essays that explore the source, yes, but also Rekdal’s own Chinese heritage, as well as her white heritage and the tension inherent in biracialism.
So, for those of you keeping score at home, there’s a lot of tension in West. A lot of discomfort in having to sit—first in poem form, then in essay—in the hardships of others. There aren’t a lot of lines in West that would have been set against a pretty background and saved on someone’s Pinterest board circa 2015. (To be clear: no shade on those kinds of poems or those kinds of Pinterest boards. We like poetry in all its forms here.) Instead, there’s a heft to this collection that feels important, especially if you, like me, live in the West and benefit from, or gloss completely over, the blood and sweat and tears that went into “civilizing” it. “Ways to die: blasting accident, derailment, boiler crack. Crushed between trains crossing in the night,” Rekdal writes, and the list goes on.
West isn’t, and cannot be, an all-encompassing list of the suffering of those aforementioned myriad demographics, nor does it limit itself to suffering. But it is a fascinating and weighty addition to a more comprehensive view of the place that millions of us call home.
Ring Reads 