Books like Westlake

When I was growing up, all I learned about my home was the year Hawaiʻi became a state.

My mother forbid me from speaking local pidgin at home because of the prevailing stereotype that locals were uneducated, unrefined, and not able to understand the complexities of the wider world.

Television and film portrayed people from Hawaiʻi as pagans needing saving from themselves, who drank and sinned themselves to death unless saved by white foreigners. In more ways than one, the loss of the Hawaiian Kingdom was placed on the shoulders of leaders too weak and simple-minded to maintain and protect it.

Hawai’i’s Story challenges that. Written by Queen Liliʻiuokalani after she was imprisoned and overthrown by a group backed by U.S. Marines and intended to aid in the fight against annexation, this memoir reveals a Hawaiian Kingdom that is the most literate nation in the world at the time and… show more.

Pau Hana is a concise overview of the immigration of workers from around the Pacific and the world, which created Hawai‘i's multiethnic community in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The immigrants were recruited by the Hawaiian Monarchy and white sugar planters as laborers for their highly profitable plantations. Workers arrived from China, Portugal, Japan, Puerto Rico, Korea, the Philippines, and even Norway, and settled in the islands. Takaki details the work they did, the camp housing, the abuses and retaliation, the opium and alcohol, the gambling and prostitution, and the worker strikes that eventually resulted in better wages and working conditions.

John Dominis Holt grew up in a wealthy chiefly family, with Hawaiian, Tahitian, and white ancestors. His memoirs give a detailed, colorful account of the wealthy Honolulu neighborhood around Fort and Beretania Streets, where he grew up in the 1920s and 30s and where “Hawaiian-ness was strongly mixed with British, American, and Asian influences.” Unforgettable are Holt’s accounts of learning about the worship of sharks from an old Hawaiian fisherman and living in the lively working-class district of Kalihi, where his religious mother moved the family to escape the decadence of Fort and Beretania Streets. Holt describes the experience as “a protracted hula ‘auwana” (modern hula), where a multiracial group of several thousand people “lived in comparative harmony,” speaking Hawaiian, Asian languages, and pidgin English, the lingua franca of plantation communities.

Bamboo Ridge Press was established in 1978 to publish the multiethnic literature of Hawai’i. In this selection the best of its first eight years, the writers, of various ancestries, celebrate their families, cultures, and traditions, but also the cultures and traditions of others—a Hawaiian poet writes about a Tang fisherman; a poet of Chinese-Japanese ancestry and a writer of Puerto Rican ancestry reflect on Hawaiian activism; a white poet features bodhisattvas and Kuan Yin while another dedicates her song to a Hawaiian musician. Native Hawaiian writers are underrepresented in this collection published during a renaissance of Hawaiian culture, but a year earlier, in 1985, Bamboo Ridge also published Mālama: Hawaiian Land and Sea, an anthology of Native Hawaiian writers.

Wars take a long time to end. Work is done to bury the loss, grief, and guilt described above as quickly as possible. Oftentimes the forces that stand to profit from this forgetting succeed, except among those groups which are either ignored or for whom the loss is too deep. What Layli Long Soldier’s brilliant Whereas discloses is how the acts of government, the papers generated like planks over a well, seek to hide that grief and loss, and how those groups might reclaim the stories those papers hope to disappear. 

I love how Jericho Brown takes traditional poetic forms, alters them, and blends them into his completely modern voice.

These poems sing of degradation and exaltation, hate and love. They bring the music of a Black, queer man to all of us in unforgettable lines and stanzas.

Considered to be the longest poem in the world, the Sanskrit Mahabharata is comprised of around 1.8 million words (for comparison: the combined length of the seven Harry Potter books is barely 1.1 million words). At 928 pages, Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling is by no means a short book, but it does make the massive Sanskrit epic very accessible for general readers. While the Sanskrit Mahabharata is primarily composed in couplets called shlokas, Carole Satyamurti’s masterful retelling is in blank verse, which is the meter of my two favorite English epics: John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Jack Mitchell’s The Odyssey of Star Wars. I also especially love the way Satyamurti presents Karna, the secret elder brother of Pandavas and one of the greatest tragic heroes in world literature. 

What I love most about this book is the strident, confident way the poems tackle our expectations about prose and poetic genres. Right from the collection's first poem, the book says that language is only the beginning; it still has its limits, though it can achieve longevity in the right conditions. 

However, my favorite poem of the collection is 'Shakespeare Doesn't Care,' a poem where Dove imagines Shakespeare’s confident, coy response to comments on his prolific, inimitable career. In doing so, she highlights how his work points the finger of judgment through time. Dove does this, too.

This is not a book of portents, nor is it strictly a celebration or mourning of an apocalyptic world; instead, it highlights the strange echoes of history.

I love the simplicity of the language and how close the poet feels to the natural world. In her plainspoken language, Oliver’s poems transport us through nature and, by the way, teach us what it is to be human. Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the pages in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence.

It is the smallest element that counts the most in Oliver’s poems because it contains so much in so little, stripping the poet’s and our powers of observation down to an essential moment. Who doesn’t love Mary Oliver’s work?

No one describes the natural world like Elizabeth Bishop does. She writes with clarity about the way humans look at the world and travel through it. Her writing is pungent and economical.

When I want to describe a natural feature or feeling, I sometimes ask myself, “What would Elizabeth Bishop say?”