Imaginary Vessels
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- 15,99 €
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- 15,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her subtle and multifaceted fifth collection, Rekdal (Animal Eye) turns various receptacles into representations of transience, sustenance, and drive. As the poet mulls motherhood as an imperfect substitute for immortality, a child mourns a burst soap bubble: "They don't last!" The oyster, meanwhile, contains the pearl within its "labial meats" and the "heart rustles/ in its manila folder." Rekdal's lyrical symbols connect through the ages: "a car inhales the gas/ containing bones of dissolved dinosaurs/ and the cheese breeds mold to heal the cut that holds/ the hurt cradled inside the body." A series of poems in homage to performer and wit Mae West are as delightfully subversive as their subject. In the alliterative voice of West, Rekdal advises, "Be belle and ball, too, a deb Coco-labeled;/ be ocelot, be lancet, be candle and cabled." In another series, inspired by Andrea Modica's photographs of skulls unearthed from the Colorado Mental Health Institute, Rekdal views the skulls as haunted former residencies of their owners' shattered psyches. "What dreams remain encased inside this freckled/ gourd, this ostrich egg cradled on cardboard," she writes. One particular skull resembles the desiccated remains of an armadillo's shell abandoned and obsolete. Rekdal's address of the fundamental fragility at the center of existence possesses a vigor that inspires rereading.
