May the dead be ever-evidenced May their clandestine namesbellow from the mouth of an August monsoon May they coax the truth from every storm Long ago there lived a jungle whose only cloth was camouflageAll those who came to it learned the burden of hiding Long ago we memorizedthe refrains of wild birds stitched them underneath our evacuated skinsThen man Then soldier Then vividness of saffron and canary arriving as small showers divulging its anatomy to the ecosystemTo keep the covert buried is nothow this story bends The insects have always knownTheir lineage of pollen and the children of insects know tooMay this Secret War its author of poisons its professor of counterfeit treatieskidnapper of honeybees each iotaof its polluted doing may it all burn and blister under its own nakedness
Declassified
Feature Date
- May 17, 2023
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“Declassified” from Yellow Rain.
Copyright © 2021 by Mai Der Vang.
Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“With Yellow Rain, Vang scores onto the record the previously silenced experiences of Hmong, rupturing the erasures within Western accounts of history, all while holding the US government, media, and scientists accountable. It is revolutionary.”
—Poetry
“[Mai Der Vang] transform[s] the impersonal and politically and ethically deceitful into a vivid reclamation of the brutal truth.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Vang’s lyrical interventions strike powerful notes of lamentation and rage.”
—The New Yorker, Briefly Noted
“Vang memorably reckons with a complex and tragic cultural history.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain spoke to a piece of my heart that has yearned for such a work as this to come forth in response to the layered tragedies of our shared history, to establish a record in which our voices cannot be erased, our bodies forgotten, and our names forsaken. . . . An indictment of the highest and most poetic order.”
—Kao Kalia Yang
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