Book Review

What this book cares about most:

• Conversations with a community that cannot speak back; namely, the Chinese railroad workers whose histories and crucial contributions to the book’s Lake Tahoe region have been largely lost to time and intentional, violent erasure.
• In a long central poem titled “高 祖 父 : A Correspondence : 太 爺,” Mar speaks directly to her own great-grandfather, one such railway laborer, and themes of silence and attempts at reconciliation continue to wind fluidly throughout Water Guest.

Poems that moved me:

• “Stage 1: Cold Shock / Threat No. 2 Heart and Blood Pressure Problems”
• “Fire Control”
• “高 祖 父 : A Correspondence : 太 爺”
• “Property”
• “Song for the Great-Great-Grandfather”
• “Lake of the Sky”

Lines that lingered:

• “Where can I set this inheritance down?”
• “The pines remember to burst themselves / open. This is one way to grow.”
• “Dreams of railroad spikes falling / from your son’s eyes.”
• “You’re teaching me the beauty / of revisionist history.”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• The ever-changing sensory qualities of Lake Tahoe, such as its “steel-shirred gray, a sheet of velvet, / soft-napped” in winter, the way it “swells with ash” during a wildfire, or when sun “glitters off the water like day-stars.”
• Largely free verse with occasional received forms, including the duplex, haibun, and sonnet.
• Ample manipulation of archive and source materials, including ekphrasis based on historical photographs, “failed translations” of Chinese poems, and erasures evocatively drawn from water safety resources.

This book is in conversation with:

• Teow Lim Goh, Bitter Creek.
• Cathy Linh Che, Becoming Ghost.
• Muriel Rukeyser, Book of the Dead.

Questions this book made me ask:

• What would I ask of—or declare to—my own great-grandfather?
• Whose histories don’t I know, and how might I investigate them through poetry? What are my personal connections to history, and have I grappled with their complications?
• Though Mar supplies extensive notes on her poems, she does not translate the Chinese characters that she uses throughout, perhaps sharing some of her own experience of feeling left outside language. What different effects might this device have on various readers, and how does this choice demonstrate an evolution in the responsibility of the reader?

Who I would give this book to:

• Citizens interested in excavations of this country’s lesser known and buried histories.
• Readers who appreciate direct address, poetic journalism, and a lyrical grappling with silent ancestors.