Conundrum Press, 2016. Available from Amazon or Bookshop.
About
Between 1910 and 1940, Chinese immigrants to America were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay. As they waited for weeks and months to know if they could land, some of them wrote poems on the walls. All the poems we have on record were found in the men’s barracks: the women’s quarters were destroyed in a fire.
Islanders imagines the lost voices of the detained women. It also tells stories of their families on shore, the staff at Angel Island, and the 1877 San Francisco Chinatown Riot. A blend of fact and fiction, politics and intimacy, these poems chronicle a forgotten episode in American history and prefigure today’s immigration debates.
Featured in PBS NewsHour, Colorado Public Radio, and The New Yorker.
More Reviews and Interviews.
Excerpts
- PANK:: Five Poems
- Poecology:: Off the Record
- Pilgrimage:: Daydreams (Volume 38, Issue 1) (Print)
- Winter Tangerine Review:: Paper Son (Volume 5)
Essays
Footsteps on the Sea (The Philadelphia Review of Books):: On visiting Alcatraz when I missed the ferry to Angel Island.
Coastlines (The Common Online):: Some walks on the Northern California coast, including my first visit to Angel Island in 2010.
The Last Poems I Loved: The Angel Island Poems (The Rumpus).
Angel Island: A Photo Essay:: Pictures from my second visit in 2013.
The Walls Speak: Excavating the Chinese Immigration Experience at Angel Island (Los Angeles Review of Books):: On the existing literature and scholarship on Angel Island.
The Dehumanizing Politics of Likability (Los Angeles Review of Books):: On writing unlikable characters in this book and beyond.
Selected Praise
In between seeing and saying. In between shadow and fire. The voices and words in Islanders honor the bodies of women disappeared from history, reminding us how it is that America has always been standing on the bodies of those it swallowed whole. In the lost voices of Chinese women detained at Angel Island we have the chance to yet hear something from the ruins: song. – Lidia Yuknavitch
These poems are imagined out of ash—script written on walls of a detention building that burned down and took the record with it. Teow Lim Goh would have those voices back, voices from the barracks, voices at the gates, on sea crossings to China, on bay crossings to San Francisco, amid riots and in cold examination rooms, in a brothel, in a prison shower, in rooms of privilege and power, challenging readers to navigate layered tone and intersubjectivity, all of it staged at the theatre of lost history, recovered. – Chris Ransick
Projects
Book artist Gail Watson and I made a selection of these poems into a gorgeous artist book, The Walls Speak.
Jenny Holzer features some of these poems in White Light, her permanent LED installation in San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center.
Kundiman included some of these poems in their Poetry and Democracy Action Calendar in March 2019.
Visiting
Angel Island is now a part of the California State Parks system. It is accessible by ferry from San Francisco and Tiburon.
Teow Lim Goh 