Paradise
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really? Redel navigates geopolitical perimeters while also questioning the border between the living and the dead and delineating the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. With stark lyricism and unflinching attention, Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and asks readers to see the threads that tie contemporary catastrophes to the exigencies and flight paths that made us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stunning fourth collection from Redel (Woman Without Umbrella) is her most ambitious yet, a reflection on exile, migration, and diaspora that is at once intimate and sweeping. Drawing on family histories known and imagined, the poet ranges across time and place. "I reached my body into another century," she writes. "If I'm walking a path hugging the Hudson,/ how is it I'm in Romania, birthing my mother in a high bed,// in another home the family abandons just in time?" A first-generation American of Belgian, Egyptian, Polish, Romanian, and Russian descent, the poet searches for stories of lineage: "What is my city? My country? Is homeland... Every city,// a boat to a next refuge." She reckons with multiple positions: "We tended. We kissed. We starved, fattened, raped./ We hung up, hung out. We shot, shattered, raped." Stunned by complicity, she asks: "How could they hold our hands if they knew/ what we'd done with our hands." For all of the brutality captured, Redel's writing shows a constant and tender regard for beauty: "All those years of worry when I might have chosen wonder." Readers aching for poetry of compassion and consequence will embrace this bold book.
