Transcendental Train Yard is a collection of color serigraphs accompanied by bilingual poems, in Spanish and English, inspired by the artwork. The art also incoporates the poetry, thus making the book a unique, reflexive form of ekphrastic creativity. Transcendental Train Yard provides the reader a glimpse of the role the railroad and the carpas (itinerant vaudeville troupes) played in the Mexican American community. Artist Marta Sánchez and poet Norma Elia Cantú collaboratively render images and words that poignantly reflect specific periods in that history. The scholarly essays by Constance Cortez and Peter Haney and the evocative preface by noted Chicano scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto bring an added depth.