Yellow Rain

Winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer. After the war in Laos ended, Hmong refugees reported a substance falling from the sky that sickened and killed; Western scientists later attributed it to bee droppings, and the accounts were set aside. Mai Der Vang reopens the case in poems built from declassified cables, interview transcripts, and redaction itself, letting the documents sit on the page in their blacked-out form. The result is documentary poetry that argues, and the argument is about whose testimony counts as evidence. This is the most formally ambitious book in the catalog and among the most important: it takes a dismissal that Hmong people have lived with for forty years and makes the dismissal itself the subject. For readers of poetry, and for anyone working on the war's unfinished record.