Published by Graywolf Press
Forthcoming September 21, 2021
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