{"id":24273,"date":"2013-12-04T16:40:34","date_gmt":"2013-12-04T22:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=24273"},"modified":"2023-12-04T18:22:45","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T00:22:45","slug":"paisley-rekdals-animal-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/paisley-rekdals-animal-eye\/","title":{"rendered":"Paisley Rekdal’s Animal Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are pleased to announced that Paisley Rekdal’s Animal Eye, from the University of Pittsburgh Press, has been selected for the 2013 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s But a Storm Is Blowing From Paradise by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, <\/em>published by Red Hen Press,\u00a0 and House Under the Moon <\/em>by Michael Sowder, published by Truman State University Press, were finalists for the award.<\/p>\n

————<\/p>\n

\"paisleyrekdal\"<\/a><\/h3>\n

Violence and Warmth<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paisley Rekdal\u2019s Animal Eye<\/em> is one of the only books of poetry I devour compulsively in one sitting. After three poems, I nod: So that\u2019s why she won the Rilke.<\/em> (The Rilke is one of the most coveted poetry prizes around; only two years old, it comes with a $10,000 pat on the back.) I turn the page and have the same experience: it\u2019s another unexpected ending, another graceful collusion of violence and warmth.<\/p>\n

Rekdal doesn\u2019t have her nose in the air. She spins the colloquial and the elegant, the \u201cshit and the satin,\u201d and I revel in the fierce pleasure her speaker feels being outwitted by a horse and turned to by a lover.<\/p>\n

Her poems are powerful for their juxtaposition. In Madame Tussaud\u2019s Wax Museum we rubber-neck the living dead and grin at an epitaph, \u201cPassenger, . . . lament not his fate, \/ for were he living, \/ thou would\u2019st be dead.\u201d But sprinkled throughout the wax images, Rekdal leads us into an exam room where her mother is undressed, and nobody is joking anymore \u201cabout the pesticides her father used, little silver canister \/ swinging at his hip.\u201d The surgery goes poorly. Cancer blossoms on the x-ray \u201clike a Japanese lotus in a dish of water,\u201d and we\u2019re wrought by the return of the earlier address: \u201cPassenger: \/ I had no idea what it meant, \/ lingering alone, black-eyed in doorways\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

In one of my favorite poems, her oft-silent grandfather returns in a dream. After his passing, Rekdal was stunned to discover his journals of fluent Chinese and English. But even in her dream he\u2019s voiceless, instead pressing to her \u201ca box \/ filled with stamps torn off missives from Taiwan \/ and Russia, Denmark, Sweden, each one faded \/ yet folded carefully up, some in onionskin,\u201d as though the remnant of communication could ever stand in for the real thing. \u201cWhy did he believe such minutiae needed preserving?\u201d she asks, and in her dream the loss echoes.<\/p>\n

Despite these griefs, despite the dying salmon and gutted caribou, her poetry is vibrant, exciting, and full of pleasure. And not in a bleeding heart way. There\u2019s true ambivalence here. To Levi Rubeck of BOMBLOG<\/a> she said, \u201cI\u2019m as attracted to the discomfiting as I am to the beautiful, which is part of our experience of the sublime anyway, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cArctic Scale,\u201d \u201coil rigs dip their certain needles \/ and the Inuit women\u2019s breast milk has been declared \/ hazardous waste.\u201d Yet in the very next stanza Rekdal declares, \u201cIt\u2019s so beautiful here. Here is a wall-sized field of green \/ with patches of corn silk. Here is a miraculous range \/ seamed with what I have to be told is coal, \/ the enormous, glassy sea chattering its blue \/ to the sky, the glacier clasped between them \/ quietly disappearing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her email exchange with Rubeck she says romanticizing landscape doesn\u2019t serve us. \u201cThere was a wonderful piece in the New York Times\u00a0recently about the BLM in Utah, and the fact that the community of Vernal wanted to rake in all this oil money from drilling but, to their great surprise, realized that they now had the second worst air quality in the U.S. from its effects on the ozone. It\u2019s not enough to see the natural world as simply beautiful, or simply damaged, or simply an economic opportunity. The sad thing is, the natural world is all these things to us now, and advocating for it means we have to discuss\u2014and see\u2014the uglier ‘meanings’ it has for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the complexity of her voice falters in a few of the last poems, Rekdal\u2019s collection is a stunning and hungry portal into intimacy. We are the animal in Animal Eye, trying to see, attempting to understand, and turning to the physical for comfort.<\/p>\n

Animal Eye<\/em> by Paisley Rekdal
\nUniversity of Pittsburgh Press (February 2012)
\n96 pages
\n$15.95<\/p>\n

About the Author
\nPaisley Rekdal is associate professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of three previous poetry collections: The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, A Crash of Rhinos, and Six Girls Without Pants, as well as a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee. She is the recipient of the Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, and the 2011\u20132012 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. Learn more about the author at her website: paisleyrekdal.com.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are pleased to announced that Paisley Rekdal’s Animal Eye, from the University of Pittsburgh Press, has been selected for the 2013 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s But a Storm Is Blowing From Paradise by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, published by Red Hen Press,\u00a0 and House Under […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":848,"featured_media":24325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[1710,1778],"class_list":["post-24273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-15-bytes-book-awards","tag-paisley-rekdal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/paisleyrekdal.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-29 14:40:45","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24273"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72487,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24273\/revisions\/72487"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}