In lieu of the in-person Shop Talk on Paisley Rekdal that was to be held on Tuesday, April 7 and her readings on April 8 (Phoenix) and April 9(Tucson), please enjoy this overview of Rekdal’s work. Here you will find biographical information, links to poems and interviews, and writing prompts for you to explore.
BIO
Paisley Rekdal grew up in Seattle, Washington and currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah where she is a professor and the state’s Poet Laureate. Rekdal is the daughter of a Chinese American mother and a Norweigen father. Rich with metaphor and lyric, Rekdal’s work often deals with themes of racial identity and the immigrant experience. She is the author of six collections of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos (2000), Six Girls Without Pants (2002), The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (2007), Animal Eye (2012), Imaginary Vessels (2016), and Nightingale (2019), one autobiographical book of essays titled The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (2000), a hybrid photo-text memoir titled Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (2011) and one book-length nonfiction essay titled The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam (2017).
POEMS & PROMPTS
And the black water under the boats with their pools
of bilge rainbowed out like rinds
of steak fat, the salt thick
in my nostrils, but pleasant, too: details
I still remember from Bishop’s poem, everything
else about it lost. At the docks,
I watched my friend slip
in her rubber boots; the wide, wet planks
glossy with mosses. You must walk
Prompt: Pick a memory to write about and stay close to the minutia. Include as many small, sensory details as you can. If you find yourself wanting to stray from the small details to paint a bigger picture, pull back and see if you can convey the memory through what you remember seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling.
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 you
to watch my working in it,
touching my hands to the greening tips or
tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild
the living and the dead both
snap off in my hands?
Prompt: There is a lot of fear, terror, and grief to be felt right now. There are also moments of unique happiness, hope, and delight. Write a poem about two opposing feelings you are experiencing or have experienced. Write about how those two (or more) feelings coexist, how they inform one another. Does despair brighten joy? Can abundance serve as a foil to loss?
No one ever died for a bite
of one, or came back from the dead
for a single taste: the cool flesh
cellular or stony, white
as the belly of the winter hare
or a doe’s scut, flicking,
before she mates. Even an unripe one
is delicious, its crisp bite cleaner
almost than water and its many names
just as inviting: Bartlett and Comice,
Prompt: Write a love poem to a fruit or vegetable.
It is important to remember that you will die,
lifting the fork with the sheep’s brain
lovingly speared on it to the mouth, the little
piece smooth on the one side as a baby
mouse pickled in wine; on the other, blood-
plush and intestinal atop
its bed of lentils. The lentils
were once picked over for stones
in the field of India perhaps, the sun
shining into tractor blades slow-moving
Prompt: Write a surreal occasional poem. It can be about an anniversary, a life milestone, a birthday, or something else. The weirder your imagery and language, the better.
INTERVIEWS