Paisley Rekdal

Wolfgang Jager has found himself on the wrong side of a world war. Esther Lange is trapped inside a war of her own. Can loving their enemies set them both free? Wolfgang Jager grew up in Mason City, Iowa. So, whats he doing fighting for the Germans? If only his parents hadnt moved back to their native Germany when they believed Hitler to be a hero. Its almost a relief when he is captured by the Americans and sent to a Wisconsin POW camp. When the darkness turns to nightmare and Wolfgang is accused of murder, can he stand firm in his faith - and snatch the woman he loves out of the mouths of lions?

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed elegy,” all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation.

The Broken Country uses a violent incident that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012 as a springboard for examining the long-term cultural and psychological effects of the Vietnam War. To make sense of the shocking and baffling incident--in which a young homeless man born in Vietnam stabbed a number of white men purportedly in retribution for the war--Paisley Rekdal draws on a remarkable range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and also by American-born veterans over the past decades. She interweaves a narrative about the crime with information collected in interviews, historical examination of the arrival of Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s, a critique of portrayals of Vietnam in American popular culture, and discussions of the psychological consequences of trauma. This work allows us to better understand transgenerational and cultural trauma and advances our still complicated struggle to comprehend the war.

Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly, Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states "It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves."

Intimate brilliantly redefines "memoir" by assembling its narratives from divergent sources: the mixed-race marriage of Paisley Rekdal's parents, the life of photographer Edward S. Curtis (chronicler and myth-maker of the Old West), and the almost unknown story of Alexander Upshaw, Curtis's Native American guide and interpreter. Typographically adventurous, Rekdal uses a combination of prose, poetry, and photographs to create a panoramic yet intimate encounter with American history, and a new way of thinking about the riddle of identity.

In Paisley Rekdal's second book of poems, all the flavors of one's expectations, every conceivable misconception and desire, each relationship, loss and spectacle are brought forth naturally, as though they had simply stepped from behind some trees. The poems frequently find themselves standing in Japanese block prints, or in Delos, or before a painting by Caravaggio, or inside the tale of Atalanta and Meleager. Rekdal's is a poetry of subtlety and grace, but shocking in its directness, its refusal to obscure or deny the difficult life to which self-knowledge must bring us. It is a poetry born not of mere technique, but of the unrelenting necessity to know and then to speak.

""Compelling, appealing, cinematic. Rekdal refreshes the meaning and the image of being displaced in this world." -The Boston Globe "Rekdal's work deeply satisfies, for it witnesses and wonders over the necessary struggles of human awareness and being." -Rain Taxi "In acknowledging the disappointing facts of our existence and singing her way into its amazement, she has created poetry that lives alongside the misery we sometimes witness-and sometimes cause." -Slate Paisley Rekdal questions how identity and being inhabit metaphorical and personified "vessels," from blown glass and soap bubbles to skulls unearthed at the Colorado State Mental Institution. Whether writing short lyrics or a sonnet sequence celebrating Mae West, Rekdal's intellectually inquisitive and carefully researched poems delight in sound, meter, and head-on engagement. Illustrated with twelve Andrea Modica photographs. From "You're": Vague as fog and turnip-hipped, a creel of eels that slithers in stains. Dirty slate, you're Diamond Lil. She's you, you say. You're her. She's I. O Mae, fifth grade, we dressed in feathers and our mothers' slit pink slips, dipped into your schema and your accent, aspiring (like you) to be able to order coffee and have it sound like filth. Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of poetry, a book of personal essays, and a mixed media book of photography, poetry, fiction and non-fiction. She lives in Salt Lake City and teaches at the University of Utah"--

"A timely, nuanced work that dissects the thorny debate around cultural appropriation and the literary imagination. How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In Appropriate, creative writing professor Paisley Rekdal addresses a young writer to delineate how the idea of cultural appropriation has evolved--and perhaps calcified--in our political climate. Rekdal examines the debate between appropriation and imagination, exploring the ethical stakes of writing from the position of a person unlike ourselves. What follows is a penetrating exploration of fluctuating literary power and authorial privilege, about whiteness and what we really mean by the term "empathy." Rekdal offers a study of techniques, both successful and unsuccessful, that writers from William Styron to Peter Ho Davies to Jeanine Cummins have employed to create characters outside their own identities. Lucid, reflective, and astute, Appropriate presents a generous new framework for one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature"--

In these quizzically probing and provocative poems, atoms and torture, tattoos and laundromats, mug shots, the theory of light, and such personalities as Joe Louis and Bruce Lee join in shaping a simultaneously personal and historical narrative of love, family, and desire. The tension between the public and the private saturates these poems with a breathless energy that carries the reader through Rekdal’s self-aware depiction of American culture and romance, complete with Harlequin romance novels and an account of her parents’ courtship. Though Rekdal delights in turning traditional images of love upside down, what she finally offers is a grateful and graceful view of humanity, which convinces us that, as she says in “Convocation”: “Nothing is a single moment . . . / No private event lacks history.”

When you come from a mixed race background as Paisley Rekdal does — her mother is Chinese American and her father is Norwegian– thorny issues of identity politics, and interracial desire are never far from the surface. Here in this hypnotic blend of personal essay and travelogue, Rekdal journeys throughout Asia to explore her place in a world where one’s “appearance is the deciding factor of one’s ethnicity.” In her soul-searching voyage, she teaches English in South Korea where her native colleagues call her a “hermaphrodite,” and is dismissed by her host family in Japan as an American despite her assertion of being half-Chinese. A visit to Taipei with her mother, who doesn’t know the dialect, leads to the bitter realization that they are only tourists, which makes her further question her identity. Written with remarkable insight and clarity, Rekdal a poet whose fierce lyricism is apparent on every page, demonstrates that the shifting frames of identity can be as tricky as they are exhilarating.