An extraordinary lyric and visual meditation on place, nature, and art rippling out from Marfa, Texas
Hey, Marfa
Poems
- “Yang’s third book of poems is an ode to the past and present of, yes, Marfa. . . . Yang collaborates here with the artist Rackstraw Downes, and the elegant precision of Downes’s paintings and drawings of an electrical substation is nicely matched by Yang’s playfully exacting lines.”—The New York Times Book Review, The Best Poetry of 2018
"leave your pretense at the Prada, a quiet simplicity?
settles in, to start anew or continue to lose?
your way and loose your imagination....” Stra pauses,?
tosses back his Mezcalero, and I notice the scar?
running across the gular skin of his throat. “But hey,?
Marfa, what do I know, I just got here, tomorrow?
hasta pronto—an airstrip would kill you."
—from “Stra”
settles in, to start anew or continue to lose?
your way and loose your imagination....” Stra pauses,?
tosses back his Mezcalero, and I notice the scar?
running across the gular skin of his throat. “But hey,?
Marfa, what do I know, I just got here, tomorrow?
hasta pronto—an airstrip would kill you."
—from “Stra”
Situated in the outreaches of southwest Texas, the town of Marfa has long been an oasis for artists, immigrants looking for work, and ranchers, while the ghosts of the indigenous and the borders between languages and nations are apparent everywhere. The poet and translator Jeffrey Yang experienced the vastness of desert, township, sky, and time itself as a profound clash of dislocation and familiarity. What does it mean to survive in a physical and metaphorical desert? How does a habitat long associated with wilderness and death become a center for nourishment and art?
Yang has fashioned a fascinating, multifaceted work—an anti-travel guide, an anti-western, a book of last words—that is a lyrical, anthropological investigation into history, culture, and extremity of place. Paintings and drawings of Marfa’s landscapes and substations by the artist Rackstraw Downes intertwine with Yang’s texts as mutual nodes and lines of energy. Hey, Marfa is a desert diary scaled to music that aspires to emit particles of light.
Yang has fashioned a fascinating, multifaceted work—an anti-travel guide, an anti-western, a book of last words—that is a lyrical, anthropological investigation into history, culture, and extremity of place. Paintings and drawings of Marfa’s landscapes and substations by the artist Rackstraw Downes intertwine with Yang’s texts as mutual nodes and lines of energy. Hey, Marfa is a desert diary scaled to music that aspires to emit particles of light.
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About the Author
Credit: Meredith Heuer
Praise
- “Yang’s third collection offers a fractal portrait of Marfa, the improbable art mecca in the Texas badlands with its vibrant culture and stark scrubby landscape where ‘the blood of the defeated runs / fast through the earth’s veins.’ Rackstraw Downes’s paintings and drawings of the area’s electrical grid add a visual element throughout.”—The New York Times Book Review
- “[Hey, Marfa is] part versified diary, part commonplace book, shot through with desert father-like meditations on oblivion.”—The New York Review of Books
- “Part-love-song-part-historical-exposé, Jeffery Yang’s Hey, Marfa is a multi-faceted portrait of Marfa, Texas. . . . A blend of both traditional and experimental forms, Hey, Marfa gives voices of the past space in the present.”—Electric Literature
- “Marfa is lucky to earn such a quicksilver ode from Yang, whose poems are flexible, expansive, sonorously clever.”—The Millions
