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About Water Guest
“On a fire day,
children are not allowed outside without masks.
Unmitigated curse might be the Earth’s secret
name
for humanity. The melting point of steel
is twenty-five hundred degrees. Bone does not
melt
but burns. What is the melting point of history?”
—Excerpt from “Fire Control”
Praise for Water Guest
“Mar contends with the white-gloved history of the American West, forcing us to hold our breaths, to keep our eyes open, to face what has been hidden, to dive into the murkiness beneath our feet. She doesn’t hold her tongue in this searing collection. ‘What is the melting point of history?’ she dares. Incendiary—so hot—this book; it just might burn shit down.”
— Tommye Blount, National Book Award Finalist and author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue
“In a probing search for lost connection, through powerful poems centered on Tahoe’s icy lake, Mar resists the erasure of her Chinese ancestors who labored there (not an ink stroke left in their own hand), inquiring into their silence in eloquent language of unstoppable invention, evocative lyricism, and historical correction.”
— Eleanor Wilner, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and awardee of the 2019 Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America
“Whether meditating on the natural world, interrogating the personal life, or excavating history, the waters in this collection are vast, ancient, and powerful. Mar writes with a fine lyrical precision and a stirring range of feeling to connect the world of the reader to the world of the poem. In each of these pages you’ll find something human, something of yourself, as the poems call out: ‘Here you are, reflected / in the water’s depths.’”
— Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route
Questions this book made me ask:
Erica Reid, Colorado State University Center for Literary Publishing
What would I ask of—or declare to—my own great-grandfather?
Whose histories don’t I know, and how might I investigate them through poetry? What are my personal connections to history, and have I grappled with their complications?
Though Mar supplies extensive notes on her poems, she does not translate the Chinese characters that she uses throughout, perhaps sharing some of her own experience of feeling left outside language. What different effects might this device have on various readers, and how does this choice demonstrate an evolution in the responsibility of the reader?
A mountain must be accommodated
Lake Tahoe: home of the Washoe Tribe, a shining blue jewel that crowns the Sierra Nevada, and a beloved American vacation destination made accessible by the transcontinental railroad built largely by Chinese laborers. This gorgeous location forms the site from which Caroline M. Mar’s stunning collection, Water Guest, attempts to reconcile issues of identity, ownership, and place. The poems wander through Mar’s attempts to locate herself geographically, genealogically, and etymologically. A direct ancestor was a railroad laborer; is that why her love for the land feels older than herself? Or is it the siren call of the deep, clear water?
Raising questions of inheritance, the conundrum of land ownership, and the violence of history, Mar gives voice to the lost writing of Chinese laborers and silent communion to those of us still here—immigrant and Indigenous, settler and resister. This beautiful collection finds acceptance, if not resolution, through the questions themselves.
Praise for Dream of the Lake
“Mar brings us to a past world, painted as vividly as ours, made of pretty words and tragic events that leave us feeling wet and sticky, as if the algae of the lake refuse to let us free from it.
Mar’s poems are so tactile that our bodies seem to live through them.”
— Valentina Linardi for The Poetry Question
“Poetry’s old work as redress gains new expression in Caroline M. Mar’s Dream of the Lake. Looking into the ways that the self is haunted by ancestry, and the ways that place is haunted by the human, Mar enacts a scrutiny irradiated by longing. Early in this bracing chapbook, Mar presents this catalog—’chains, bodies of water, ghosts.’ And, with formal artfulness, the poems bring to light the presences in those words, giving imagery to what had been in the shadows, giving story to what had been forgotten or destroyed. Poised among landscape, history, lyric, and testimony, Dream of the Lake is a work of harsh, beautiful reckoning.”
— Rick Barot, Author of The Galleons
“Rationality and dream, beauty and terror, a sense of location and dislocation in time, in place and in identity: these things co-exist so very alluringly in Caroline M. Mar’s Dream of the Lake. Mar is at once a highly lyric poet, with the titular lake as both metaphor and as setting, and a poet of witness, to (among other things) the history of Chinese immigrants and their violent exploitation in America. When she writes ‘Sometimes a person isn’t a person at all, but a weight/ to be freighted onto someone else’s shoulder,’ she is writing about a brutal crime against Chinese railway workers, but she is also attempting a vision of relationship: that we might harm our fellow humans, or we might take them—and give ourselves—as burden, and in doing so give help.”
— Daisy Fried, Author of The Year the City Emptied and Women’s Poetry
“Where are you from / people ask me,’ the speaker of Caroline M. Mar’s anticipated chapbook, Dream of the Lake, muses in ‘水客,’ ‘ask people who look / like me.’ Mar’s collection, among many things, richly interrogates heritage, inheritance, history—personal and communal—lest her speaker remain ‘a daughter unmoored.’ Where else to look but to Lake Tahoe, to the water, for answers—which shifts, reflects, threatens to overwhelm, glistens, and fills us, very much like a history—the water ‘both clear and unknowable’? Mar plumbs the depths of what ‘the cold awakens,’ of ancestry, and her carefully rendered pastoral landscape, for ‘something to carry / into the next world,’ ‘certainty that my life has meaning’ when held up against a difficult past. Mar peers into the water to discover—to construct—some wavering self staring back. Wade into the water, dear reader—get this book!”
— Nathan McClain, Author of Previously Owned
What reviewers of Special Education have to say…
“If I imagine Mar’s book as a classroom, each poem a lesson, it’s incredible for the teacher-poet to begin by laying bare their shame. In traditional pedagogy, teachers are instructed to hold tight to their authority and limit the number of concessionary mistakes. But in Mar’s Special Education, harm is acknowledged and repented for.”
— francxs gufan nan for Muzzle Magazine
“…[H]er poems code-switch and cross-pollinate urban sociology, classical lyricism, and world-wise smack with a deft, inquisitive approach to each. . . .
Special Education is a collection of poem-tales and autobiographic truths delivered by a writer who has heard every expert opinion on her profession and identity and determined for herself, shrewdly and with practitioner’s clout, which ones hold merit. Her great power is how she convinces us of the same.”
— Arden Levine for Green Linden Review
“Mar’s poetry fights the erasure of her family, herself, and her profession from the public language surrounding teaching.”
— May-lee Chai for Eastwind Ezine