Heritance

Writing from a mixed heritage, Paisley Rekdal voices both the sins of our fathers and the suffering of our mothers.

In Paisley Rekdal's latest collection, Heritance, the body and its meanings are ever shifting—it is, at once, a legacy, an obligation, and a means of generating more bodies. Summoning memories of parents, former partners, and children both real and hypothetical, Heritance examines the personal and familial shames we inherit. Can something so ephemeral as memory be owned? In what ways do we become complicit in the political values of our families, our nations, and our chosen—or assumed—communities? Here, Rekdal grapples with the inevitable loss of loved ones and relationships, but also of climate change and social evolution—asking what values do we choose to preserve, and which ones do we reinvent for a new era? And in what ways can art recompense for our personal and cultural wounds? Meditating on race, violence, and lineage, Rekdal challenges the reader to contextualize their perspective within the corporeal, and to question what it means to love outside of “the lens of someone else's imagining."