The Ninth Island

For half a century, people from Hawai’i have called Las Vegas “The Ninth Island.” First the product of relentless advertising from casinos and airlines, now a strange truth as so many have left the islands to make lives in the desert. The Ninth Island follows Yim’s family and their years of displacement, from childhood homes to the far western edges of O’ahu, into the delirious heat of Southern Nevada. With humor, clear-eyed rage, and an abiding tenderness, Yim’s wandering poems craft makeshift homes across an unfamiliar American landscape.

The book’s second movement speaks across time to the poet’s paternal great-grandmother—born on O’ahu in the era of Chinese Exclusion and paper children then exiled to China, her documents sold to another girl—tracing an intergenerational arc of inheritance and return. Politically and emotionally capacious, The Ninth Island reckons with familial silences, hoop dreams, intertwining griefs, and the settler-colonial forces acting upon Hawai’i and the world. As impossible and necessary as an island in the desert, The Ninth Island marks the arrival of a fabulous new literary voice.