All right, so I'm going to switch to Yellow Rain here.
And I think Susan provided a very excellent introduction
and contextual background on a little bit about Yellow Rain.
And so Yellow Rain for me is a book
that's been nearly a decade in the making.
And it's a book that focuses on a reinvestigation
into the topic of yellow rain, which
was a chemical biological weapon that
was used against Hmong refugees when they were escaping
from the jungles of Laos just following the end to the US
war in Vietnam and to the end to the US proxy war in Laos.
And so what happened was that when
they began to arrive into the camps in Thailand,
a lot of the Hmong refugees would
say that there was this mysterious substance that
would fall from the airplanes.
And it would land on their skin, and it
would land on their clothing and on the vegetation around them.
And nobody knew what it was, but it was making people sick.
And there were also instances of fatalities as well.
And so as a result, the government
was really keen to get to the bottom of it, the US
government.
And they began what became a very confusing investigation
that took eight years into this yellow rain
to find out what it was.
But meanwhile, they were also blaming the Soviets
because this was all happening during the Cold War.
And then there were other countries
around the world that were also conducting
their own investigations into whatever this thing was,
whatever yellow rain was.
And so as this investigation was happening,
there were so many people involved in it
from multiple government agencies,
from the Department of Defense to the State
Department, the CIA, imagine.
And then there was academic scientists too
who were testing these samples.
And then the media also got really tied into this topic
as well.
So with so many people involved, what ended up
happening was that people had political interests.
And everyone who got involved had
something they wanted to get out of the yellow rain story.
They wanted to see their political interest fulfilled
as a result of yellow rain.
People who said it happened wanted
to have their interest fulfilled, and people who said,
oh, it's not actually a chemical weapon,
it's just something else, they had interests
that they wanted to see fulfilled.
And so over time, the Hmong stories and the Hmong
testimonies of yellow rain were just discarded,
and they were invalidated.
And so my book tries to challenge
the dismissing of these allegations
and tries to push against the erasure of this history.
So that's a very long summary, but that's
everything in a quick nutshell.
And I do want to start by reading a poem that's
in the beginning of the collection tying
some of these ideas together.
All right, here we go.
Guide for the Channeling.
"Toward a worn legacy of rain, I have been lost down
every jungle path, adrift and senseless to split open
a cascade of knowing.
I have tried with all my limber to kiln
a credo of justice, shelter those who solace inside graves.
I have been boiled in my bladed search, opening with questions
of a deserted pain to end with the cemented breath shattered
into silk.
This is where I am taking you, into a discarded vista blowing
forth a silent blaze, here in sunk villages
of the disregarded, here where even the dirt of the land
cannot muster against the threat of air.
Biomedical, vegetation, munitions unfound,
every footprint incarnate, where highlands tangle their echoes
to the land, a place, no matter how remote,
will always be too near and too much
a reminder of an expired war.
Refugees not called as people only
to be called the outcome of an event.
We are venturing into swell beyond swelling
of paperwork and protocol, slips of memo and routing cable,
and classified meeting.
Here is the talk, biological weapon, yellow spots,
apiary blame for decades to wane and cold filed.
Believe me as a torch of this wandering
that I have been digging within the origins of redaction.
Believe where I am sending you.
I have been shoveling upside down, and now my eyes stagger.
My hands ache.
My legs becoming hunter, my back a raging shadow.
I have been gardening myself into this remembrance."