Artists of Utah is pleased to announce that the winner of the 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry is Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Since 2013, the 15 Bytes Book Awards—presented each year by Artists of Utah, publisher of 15 Bytes—have honored excellence in publishing in the four categories of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and art book. This year, we are proud to recognize Rekdal’s West: A Translation as an extraordinary contribution to the literature of the region and to contemporary poetry.

From our jurors’ citation: “Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation is a masterwork of intellectual and ethical lyric making: a book that insists that poetry can hold the record open, insistently, against erasure and silence. In this hybrid project—part lyric, part documentary, part philosophy of reading and translation—Rekdal turns to the carved wall-poem left in the barracks of Angel Island, and uses it as a generative engine: to encounter, decode, metabolize, and then re-articulate the suppressed histories of the American West. The book re-positions the “West” not as the triumphant field of cowboy mythology, but as the site of violent labor extraction, nativist policy, and legal exclusions—especially the Chinese Exclusion Act—and then asks the reader to consider how that “West” continues to power our present tense.

The brilliance here is triple: the formal making, the conceptual structure, and the moral imagination. This book expands what we think a poetry collection can be. It is documentary, yes, but not simply “docu-poetics” as a style; rather, it braids the sensuous work of lyric with the evidentiary weight of the archive so that the reader has to inhabit the tension between them. It stages reading as an ethical risk. It stages writing as a practice of repair. It is a book that makes new demands on the genre—and delivers.”

For its ambition, its artistry, its necessary historical intelligence, and its fearless ethic, Artists of Utah is honored to name West: A Translation our 2023 15 Bytes Book Award Winner in Poetry.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.