Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, and three books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope. Her newest book of poems, Imaginary Vessels, will be published in October 2016.
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2022
望 鄉 / Home-Gazing
After Hesiod, “Works and Days,” lines 400–500 When summer ceases its blister, when autumn rain cools flesh with downpour and thunder, and Mars hangs high in the sky, wheels over […]
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2022
埋 / Bury
First it was a pocket watch the archeologists unearthed, its plated chain strangled inside this grave’s massed roots, black hands clawing at twelve and two. Trains run on time as […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2021
知 / Know
Frederick Jackson Turner, lecture to the American Historical Association, 1893 Come waves of men with capital; come broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, all the refinements the train ushers into each village, […]
July/Aug 2021
壤 / Soil
Brigham Young to General Dodge, Union Pacific, 1869 The locusts’ hum, at first, was like a line of flame, then the air burst into reds, silver-edged and filled with mouths […]
Nonfiction
Nov/Dec 2018
Memorial Time: Poetry, Elegy, and the War Memorial
In 1982, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was erected on the Washington, DC, mall to a storm of criticism. Senators and citizens alike complained about its lack of elegiac or […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2016
Assemblage of Ruined Plane Parts, Vietnam Military Museum, Hanoi
My eye climbs a row of spoilers soldered into ailerons, cracked bay doors haphazarded into windows where every rivet bleeds contrails of rust. An hour ago, the doctor’s wand waved […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
A Peacock in a Cage
shaking out its corona of tail feathers is like light glowing in a bulb, a man dancing inside an elevator: the space too small to quite contain him, yet contain […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
Mortal Love
If we were immortal, said the lecturer, like the Greek gods, love would not exist since time ceases to matter: love needs urgency to be felt at all at which […]
Poetry
Winter 2011
Happiness
I have been taught never to brag but now I cannot help it: I keep a beautiful garden, all abundance, indiscriminate, pulling itself from the stubborn earth. Does it offend […]
Poetry
Summer 2009
Arctic Scale
After the photos of Subhankar Banerjee The screen grows progressively red. Now the black and yellow slicker encasing the man leans like a ballet dancer across the animal, matching its […]
Paisley Rekdal
Paisley Rekdal’s most recent volume of poems is Animal Eye (Pitt, 2012). Her poems “A Peacock in a Cage” and “Mortal Love” appear in the Winter 2014 issue of The […]