{"id":98095,"date":"2024-11-01T17:47:36","date_gmt":"2024-11-02T00:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=98095"},"modified":"2025-11-08T18:02:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T01:02:48","slug":"paisley-rekdals-west-a-translation-wins-15-bytes-book-award-for-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/paisley-rekdals-west-a-translation-wins-15-bytes-book-award-for-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Paisley Rekdal\u2019s West: A Translation Wins 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Artists of Utah is pleased to announce that the winner of the 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry is Paisley Rekdal\u2019s West: A Translation<\/em> (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Since 2013, the 15 Bytes Book Awards\u2014presented each year by Artists of Utah, publisher of 15 Bytes\u2014have honored excellence in publishing in the four categories of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and art book. This year, we are proud to recognize Rekdal\u2019s West: A Translation<\/em> as an extraordinary contribution to the literature of the region and to contemporary poetry.<\/h4>\n

From our jurors’ citation: “Paisley Rekdal\u2019s West: A Translation<\/em> 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\u2014part lyric, part documentary, part philosophy of reading and translation\u2014Rekdal 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 \u201cWest\u201d not as the triumphant field of cowboy mythology, but as the site of violent labor extraction, nativist policy, and legal exclusions\u2014especially the Chinese Exclusion Act\u2014and then asks the reader to consider how that \u201cWest\u201d continues to power our present tense.<\/h4>\n

The brilliance here is triple: the formal making, the conceptual structure, and the moral imagination.\u00a0This book expands what we think a poetry collection can be. It is documentary, yes, but not simply \u201cdocu-poetics\u201d 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\u2014and delivers.”<\/h4>\n

<\/h4>\n

For its ambition, its artistry, its necessary historical intelligence, and its fearless ethic, Artists of Utah is honored to name West: A Translation<\/em> our 2023 15 Bytes Book Award Winner in Poetry.<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artists of Utah is pleased to announce that the winner of the 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry is Paisley Rekdal\u2019s West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Since 2013, the 15 Bytes Book Awards\u2014presented each year by Artists of Utah, publisher of 15 Bytes\u2014have honored excellence in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":98096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3230,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-awards","category-literary-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/paisley-rekdal-west.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-17 11:19:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98097,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98095\/revisions\/98097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}