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.

“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”