Afterland

Mai Der Vang won the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award for this debut collection, and it reads like the reason the prize exists. These are poems of the Secret War and its afterlives: spirit flight, yellow rain, border crossings, the dead who travel with the living, written in a spare, incantatory line that owes something to Hmong ritual speech without ever imitating it. It is the rare poetry book that works both as literature and as history, and readers who think they do not read poetry tend to finish it anyway. Start here for Hmong American poetry; if the collection opens something in you, the anthologies will show you the field it grew from. For adult readers, and a strong assignment in courses on Asian American literature or the wars in Southeast Asia.