In this staggering work of documentary, poetry, and collage, Mai Der Vang reopens a wrongdoing that deserves a new reckoning. As the United States abandoned them at the end of its war in Vietnam, many Hmong refugees recounted stories of a mysterious substance that fell from planes during their escape from Laos starting in the mid-1970s. This substance, known as “yellow rain,” caused severe illnesses and thousands of deaths. These reports prompted an investigation into allegations that a chemical biological weapon had been used against the Hmong in breach of international treaties. A Cold War scandal erupted, wrapped in partisan debate around chemical arms development versus control. And then, to the world’s astonishment, American scientists argued that yellow rain was the feces of honeybees defecating en masse—still held as the widely accepted explanation. The truth of what happened to the Hmong, to those who experienced and suffered yellow rain, has been ignored and discredited.

Integrating archival research and declassified documents, Yellow Rain calls out the erasure of a history, the silencing of a people who at the time lacked the capacity and resources to defend and represent themselves. In poems that sing and lament, that contend and question, Vang restores a vital narrative in danger of being lost, and brilliantly explores what it means to have access to the truth and how marginalized groups are often forbidden that access.

This poetry collection revolves around disturbing events toward the end of the Vietnam War: thousands of Hmong refugees died, and many others experienced violent illness, after exposure to a sticky, powdery substance that witnesses saw fall from planes. The U.S. accused the Soviet Union of deploying chemical weapons, which the latter denied; later, American scientists claimed that the poisonous “yellow rain” was honeybee feces. Part documentary, part puzzle, the book incorporates text from declassified documents. Vang’s lyrical interventions strike powerful notes of lamentation and rage, yet most effective are her visual collage-poems, which use fragmentation to interrogate the inhumanity of the official account.
—The New Yorker

In her second collection, Mai Der Vang manipulates collaged declassified documents and redacted files related to the use of chemical weapons on the Hmong people during the 1970s and the United Nations’ ensuing investigation, a “pageant of fiasco.” In doing so, she not only interrogates the official accounts — that the yellow rain that killed between 10,000 and 40,000 people was bee feces — but also questions how truth is constructed. She also layers her own lines over the collages or writes in conversation with fragments from her extensive historical research: “Let things come clean in a scandalous/ tornado of shimmering truth.” In spare lines driven by the imperative, Vang indicts the authorities, while also limning generational trauma as the “second child and firstborn in a new land, daughter who keeps looking back at the sky.” She makes good on her promise that “myth will not make us/ into marginalia” by asserting her power over the obscuring language of government reports in these masterful manipulations.
—Star Tribune

[Mai Der Vang] transform[s] the impersonal and politically and ethically deceitful into a vivid reclamation of the brutal truth.
—Booklist, starred review

Vang memorably reckons with a complex and tragic cultural history.
—Publishers Weekly

With Yellow Rain, Vang scores onto the record the previously silenced experiences of Hmong, rupturing the erasures within Western accounts of history, all while holding the US government, media, and scientists accountable. It is revolutionary.
—Poetry Magazine, Diana Khoi Nguyen

Yellow Rain, with its fragments of allegations, claims, and atrocities, flies in all directions, covering ample ground as it prods and overturns the nebulousness of the yellow rain attacks.
—GASHER, Genevieve Hartman

Mai Der Vang’s second book of poems is a master work in hybridity and composition, a testament to the intersection of archival research and poetry. Yellow Rain is also a meticulous history lesson and a revelation, unearthing too-long ignored truths about the US government’s culpability for the brutal suffering of the Hmong people in the mountains of Laos.
—New York Journal of Books, Sarah Kain Gutowski

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