|
Water Guest
Caroline M. Mar
Wisconsin Poetry Series
Sean Bishop and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Series Editors
Ronald Wallace, Founding Series Editor
A mountain must be accommodated
Lake Tahoe: home of the Washoe Tribe, a shining blue jewel that crowns the Sierra Nevada, and a beloved American vacation destination made accessible by the transcontinental railroad built largely by Chinese laborers. This gorgeous location forms the site from which Caroline M. Mar’s stunning collection, Water Guest, attempts to reconcile issues of identity, ownership, and place. The poems wander through Mar’s attempts to locate herself geographically, genealogically, and etymologically. A direct ancestor was a railroad laborer; is that why her love for the land feels older than herself? Or is it the siren call of the deep, clear water?
Raising questions of inheritance, the conundrum of land ownership, and the violence of history, Mar gives voice to the lost writing of Chinese laborers and silent communion to those of us still here—immigrant and Indigenous, settler and resister. This beautiful collection finds acceptance, if not resolution, through the questions themselves.
“On a fire day,
children are not allowed outside without masks.
Unmitigated curse might be the Earth’s secret name
for humanity. The melting point of steel
is twenty-five hundred degrees. Bone does not melt
but burns. What is the melting point of history?”
—Excerpt from “Fire Control”
Caroline M. Mar is the great-granddaughter of a railroad laborer and the author of Special Education and the chapbook Dream of the Lake. A high school health educator in her hometown of San Francisco, she is getting to know her new home of Oakland. A member of Rabble Collective, she has been granted residencies at Storyknife, Ragdale, and Hedgebrook, among others.
Author's Website - https://carolinemar.com/
Praise
“With Water Guest, Mar contends with the white-gloved history of the American West. She excavates that history’s wrecked vessel, for so long, moored at the bottom of Lake Tahoe, below the Pacific, beached in the footprints at Angel Island, down under in a footnote, then at last, adrift in oblivion. Within each poem, it’s the speaker’s body that keeps count, that is the rescue, the medium by which is conjured all those conquered bodies who left, and were left, long ago. For Mar, it isn’t enough to tell us what happened; no, she forces us to hold our breaths, to keep our eyes open, to face what has been hidden, to dive into the murkiness fathoms beneath our feet. And where are these soles headed? Migration, in this collection, is not simply a consideration of what the feet do; instead, its concern is with the mouth, the tongue swimming inside it, the paths languages take to legislate; to name and misname; to kill; to hide. Mar doesn’t hold her tongue in this searing collection. ‘What is the melting point of history?’ she dares. Incendiary—so hot—this book; it just might burn shit down.”
—Tommye Blount
Table of Contents
遺 產
一
Failed Translations
Dream of the Lake
Mythology
Stage 1: Cold Shock / Threat No. 1 Loss of Breathing Control
Stage 1: Cold Shock / Threat No. 2 Heart and Blood Pressure Problems
Stage 1: Cold Shock / Threat No. 3 Mental Problems
With a surface area of 191.6 square miles and a depth of 1,645 feet, Lake Tahoe is the largest and the second-deepest alpine lake in the United States
Naming
Intelligible
Burials
Stage 2: Physical Incapacitation
Portraits of the Ancestor
1870 census; Truckee, CA: Ah John, male, 18; occupation: prostitute
Stage 3: Hypothermia
S---- Valley
Fire Control
Stage 4: Circum-rescue Collapse
二
Catalog of Writings Left by Chinese Railroad Laborers of the C.P.R.R.
水 客
高 祖 父 : A Correspondence : 太 爺
三
Tragedy
Mercy
長 衫
Guest: First Translation
Swim Team Outer Space
Song for Great-Grandfather
Tie
Guest: Second Translation
Property
John Chinaman
Celestials
Guest: Third Translation
Certainty
Being Away from the Lake
Distinctions
The Ghost Ship
Song for Great-Great-Grandfather
Lake of the Sky
Acknowledgments
Notes
|
