Paisley Rekdal

A Provocation

Appropriate

A fierce, contemporary reworking of ancient mythology--from Ovid to Eden--confronts sexual violence, loss, and existential reckoning.

Nightingale

Incorporating photography and rigorous research, "Imaginary Vessels" makes history personal and the personal historical.

Imaginary Vessels

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."

Animal Eye

An attack in a grocery store parking lot launches an examination of the Vietnam War’s dark legacy—by the author of The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee. 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. “A moving and often gripping meditation on the fallout of war, from violence and racism to melancholy and trauma.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Refugees “Assembling a remarkable range of materials and testimonies, she shows us both the persistence of war’s trauma and how we might more ethically imagine those it harms.”—Beth Loffreda, author of Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder “A compact, thoughtful debut addressing violence, immigrant identity, and the long shadow of the Vietnam War…. A poignant, relevant synthesis of cultural studies and true-crime drama.—Kirkus Reviews

On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam

The Broken Country

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

An American Family Photo Album

Intimate

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.”

A Crash of Rhinos

One story more about your hair, my love, my ghost: once in 1931, fresh from Hong Kong, you posed for the camera in a silk dress, still as if stuffed, aware and not aware the foreign shores were home. Your bobbed locks, I once wrote, impossibly black, a tar waterfall marcelled as if to death - this was the hair we always saw on you, not the white, hood-like boy's cap we later cut and pasted to your skull. This was your brooding patina, your blood's (or our blood's) insistent reminder of itself. Tonight, I walk with the dogs out through the snow newly fallen, the crescent moon drawn up dawn-bright in the dark sky, and think - not of the you, but of the all of you. The now dull glances of your eyes, your hands on my hands, my own hands clutching back. What have you done to me? someone whispers, as another image of you slips past and I turn - Though in truth what have I not done to you, and what would I not do again to keep you with me? The you who were everything and nothing to me both, gone but for the details now, the sentimental. Remember?

A daughter of a Chinese-American mother and a Norwegian father reveals her personal issues and experiences of race, identity, and culture through a collection of essays and memoirs that explore a variety of global destinations and struggles.

Observations on Not Fitting in

The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee

A collection of poetry by Paisley Rekdal.

Poems

Six Girls Without Pants

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.

Shalom Auslander

Tama Janowitz

Yehuda Amichai

Susann Cokal

Dangerous Territory

Broad Street 1. 1

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.

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. What follows is a penetrating exploration of fluctuating literary power and authorial privilege, about whiteness and what we really mean by the term empathy, that examines writers from William Styron to Peter Ho Davies to Jeanine Cummins. Lucid, reflective, and astute, Appropriate presents a generous new framework for one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature.

Paisley Rekdal

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