Water Guest

"Water Guest weaves together the landscape of Lake Tahoe, the construction of the transcontinental railroad by Chinese labor in the 1800s, and questions of identity, ownership, and place. The poems emerged from the poet's curiosity about an ancestor who was a railroad laborer and her deep sense of belonging to a particular landscape. I wrote these poems because I was trying to find a way to talk about how beautiful Lake Tahoe is while making the story more complex than just, "wow this water is gorgeous." I found that complicating factor after a snowy train journey home from the mountains, when I became obsessed with curiosity about the ancestors - including at least one direct ancestor of mine - who built the tracks through such stunning and dangerous terrain"--