A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora

Les 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 Les A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora. She makes the forms sound new but it is also the memorability of her subject matter. An immigrant is compared to a whale; Noahs ark is replayed in a taxi; and physical self-love is transformed into fishs skin [that] will turn crisp / in a copper pan above a kitchen blaze. The work is both clever and poignant with unexpected characters like William Butler Yeatss mistress and a narcoleptic who is scripted into a romance narrative that involves abuse; yet as Le writes At seven years old thats what I thought love was. If you thought you knew what formal poetry was you need to read Jenna Les magical original book.--Kim Bridgford author of Human Interest