Afterland. Poems by Mai Der Vang

*Walt Whitman Award Winner 2016
*One of The New Yorker’s Poetry I Was Grateful For in 2017, selected by Dan Chiasson
*One of The Brooklyn Rail’s Best Books of 2017

“[Afterland] reminds us what a distinctive instrument the human imagination is, no matter what tune it plays. There is a story in this book, and an important one. . . . Vang writes strikingly, often chillingly visual poems, their images projected one at a time, like slides in a lecture, or perhaps in a trial. . . . Afterland works its wonders with an intentionally rationed vocabulary, its counters combined and recombined in poem after poem: stars, water, hair, bones, fire. . . . The style creates an atmosphere of impending marvels, and many of Vang’s poems perform, in words, the transformations that they describe . . . . [Afterland] is among the most satisfying débuts by an American poet in some time.”  — The New Yorker

“When I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what the current gives. When we reach the camp,

there will be thousands like us.?
If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roads and waiting pastures of America.

We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffalo as we used to many years ago, nor will we forage?  for the sweetest mangoes.

I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep.”  — from “Transmigration”

“Afterland has haunted me. I keep returning to read these poems aloud, hearing in them a language at once atavistic, contemporary, and profoundly spiritual. Mai Der Vang confronts the Secret War in Laos, the flight of the Hmong people, and their survival as refugees. That a poet could absorb and transform these experiences in a single generation—incising the page with the personal and collective utterances of both the living and the dead, in luminous imagery and a surprising diction that turns both cathedral and widow into verbs, offering both land and body as swidden (slashed and burned)—is nothing short of astonishing.Here is deep attention, prismatic intelligence, and fearless truth.”  — Carolyn Forché, judge’s statement for the Walt Whitman Award

Mai Der Vang
Afterland. Poems
Pages: 104
Pub Date: April 4, 2017
Poetry
Paperback, $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-55597-770-2
2016 Walt Whitman Award winner

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