Bøker av Paisley Rekdal

What makes reading a poem unlike reading anything else? While there are as many ways to read a poem as there are types of poetry, every poem demands a conscious attention to language. Reading poems forensically helps us bring that attention to our own writing.In Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens, acclaimed poet and teacher Paisley Rekdal demonstrates how to observe the building blocks of a poem-including its diction, form, imagery and rhythm-and construct an interpretation of its meaning. Through close analyses of contemporary and classic poems as well as creative exercises and specific, skill-based questions, this book shows how a poem takes shape and accrues meaning through the intersection of all its lyric elements. Lucid and generous, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens reveals how to read and write critically and how to appreciate-and achieve-the exhilarating craft of poetry.

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

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale.

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. Paisley Rekdal draws on a range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and by American-born veterans.

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost.

This collection of probing and provocative poems touch on atoms and torture, tattoos and laundromats, and the theory of light as they join in shaping a simultaneously personal and historical narrative of love, family and desire.