The Song Poet

Kao Kalia Yang's second memoir belongs to her father, Bee Yang, a machinist in St. Paul and a practitioner of kwv txhiaj, the improvised Hmong song poetry that carries grief, courtship, and history in a single voice. Yang structures the book like one of his albums, each chapter a track, moving from his boyhood in Laos through the refugee camps to the factory floors of Minnesota. Read it after The Latehomecomer and the two books become a pair, the daughter's story and then the father's. It matters on this shelf because kwv txhiaj is an art form almost never written down; this is one of the few books in English that lets a reader feel what the tradition does for the people inside it. For adult readers, book clubs, and anyone teaching the Hmong American experience.