“Jeffrey Thomas Leong is himself a fine poet, and his translations of 70 of the poems are nuanced, affecting, and informed by a haunting but astringent music. They do commendable justice to the Angel Island poets, writers who were not welcomed to these shores–but who nevertheless made a crucial and indelible contribution to our national literary culture.” (From the Foreword to Wild Geese Sorrow.)
― David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace
“Jeffrey Leong’s Wild Geese Sorrow is a marvelous translation of the wall poems written by Chinese held at Angel Island, California, from 1910-1940, during their immigration review. His keenly nuanced translations follow the lineation of the original poems and juxtapose images that show their classical poetic lineage. Most importantly, he humanizes each speaker by articulating the emotional pressure behind each poem. In a time of anti-immigrant sentiment, this book is important reading for all Americans.”
― Arthur Sze, author of The Red-Shifting Web
“This beautiful book is haunted by the sad and angry presence of nameless men who carved their feelings into Angel Island walls. Leong’s translations and sequencing, footnotes, and historical contextualization gift us with a glimpse into a world we might otherwise never know. Why did these men leave home? What were their thoughts about families and villages they left behind? How did they view their detention, jailers, and interrogators? Leong unveils the diversity of their personalities and social backgrounds. These poems are at the foundation of Asian American literature and are an essential contribution to American literary history.”
― Elaine H. Kim, Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley
“The fabric of American history has always been pockmarked with the stains of systematic discrimination. Many of these ugly histories we’ve chosen to ignore. In his new book, Wild Geese Sorrow, Oakland writer and poet Jeffrey Thomas Leong provides a poignant, often heartbreaking reminder of one of these oft-forgotten periods.”
― Brandon Yu, East Bay Express
“Newly translated by Jeffrey Thomas Leong in the collection Wild Geese Sorrow, the Chinese wall inscriptions are an important archive of America’s racist anti-immigrant history, and are still resonant with the country today.”
― The Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop)
“Both of Jeffrey Leong’s parents were detainees on Angel Island. Growing up, he heard a lot about what it was like for Chinese travelling to the US during the exclusion period. With the aid of an online dictionary to help in translation, as well as compensate for his inability to read Chinese characters, Jeffrey translated 90 Angel Island wall poems from Chinese to English. This allowed a wider audience to read and understand this national literary legacy.”
― Jane Shi, Sinovision English Channel
“Translation is always interpretation, and an exact reproduction of Chinese forms in English is impossible. But in paying attention to form, Leong captures something of the compression, tone, and elusive beauty of these poems. Leong’s translations remind us that the Angel Island poems were not merely graffiti or a way to pass time. They were works of art made by a people with a rich poetic and cultural heritage.”
― Teow Lim Goh (author of Islanders), Los Angeles Review of Books
“Throughout the collection, Leong successfully employs poetics with acute empathy and cultural sensitivity. The images are direct and minimalist, the line is controlled, the diction plain-spoken. What we experience in these translations are both artfulness and restraint, even when the emotions expressed are despair and rage. These poems express lament but also console. The poets grieve but also make a gesture of defiance. Perhaps another way to articulate this would be what’s been referred to as the “elusive beauty” in these poems, and it is through this that we viscerally connect to these detainee poets across time, place and privilege.”
― Karen Llagas (author of Archipelago Dust), the museum of americana
“The mixture of elegance and directness in the English translation feels true to the original in a way that is completely convincing—a work of painstaking scholarship and artistic re-creation of intimate histories resonant with current themes of “alien” exclusion. The writers have nothing to prove but their own humanity, with their lives (fortunes, destinies) on the line. Jeff Leong, in this, his first translated collection, brings us an important historical document of rescued literature, the first Chinese-American poetry written at the threshold of this country.”
― Northern California Book Reviewers (from Northern California Book Awards Ceremony Program
“The crisis of detention has returned to America recently, most apparently with the detainees in Mexico. America is currently confronting its past and current treatment of immigrants, and reading the voices of these Chinese immigrants is a reminder that there is a long and troubled history to immigration policy. This makes Leong’s effort a pertinent one for the present. Leong’s edition provides a fresh view on the poems, which collectively provide an implicit critique of a system which makes immigrants into temporary prisoners and is relevant to readers in light of the fraught debate over immigration in the United States today. Furthermore, Leong’s work points out that, while these poems are vitally important as a historical record of the thoughts and feelings of immigrant Chinese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they are also highly valuable as poetic creations. They are more than evidence of existence; they provided solace to their writers and functioned not simply as a kind of stylistic affirmation of presence but also as artifacts of intricately wrought beauty.”
― Evelyn NienMing Chen, (author of Weird English and The Annotated Poetry of Liao Entao) Hyphen Magazine