A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora

By Jenna LeLe's furious and steeled voice leaves nothing unturned, propelling these poems through explorations on displacement, womanhood, the body and its endured violences, by confronting a history as tenuous and elusive as the ghosts it conjures. She has created her own version of the Ark, one where the whale, forgotten in the original, is now carried as 'a child of immigrants, like me.' In these tender, earnest yet fierce poems, Le does not reinvent myth, but expands it to include our most damned outsiders. And how lucky we are that, like the great Robert Hayden, she has created a vision where 'Nothing human is foreign...' As such, this book is as much about loss as it is about art-making and being human--and utterly, forgivably alive.--Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky With Exit WoundsIt has been a long time since I have read a book as memorable as Jenna Le's A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora. She makes the forms sound new, but it is also the memorability of her subject m