{"id":33758,"date":"2016-05-22T09:14:02","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T15:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=33758"},"modified":"2025-10-24T08:00:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T15:00:53","slug":"sunday-blog-read-paisley-rekdal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/sunday-blog-read-paisley-rekdal\/","title":{"rendered":"READ LOCAL First: Paisley Rekdal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>

Photo by Austen Diamond<\/p><\/div>\n

SUNDAY BLOG READ\u00a0<\/strong>is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah\u2019s literary writers. Each month, 15 Bytes offers works-in-progress and \/ or recently published work by some of the state\u2019s most celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction and memoir.<\/p>\n

Today we are featuring Salt Lake City-based poet and author\u00a0Paisley Rekdal,<\/strong> winner of the inaugural 15 Bytes Book Award for poetry in\u00a0<\/strong>2013. <\/strong>At the time, reviewer Camille Pack wrote that the winning collection titled Animal Eye<\/em> was “a stunning and hungry portal into intimacy. We are the animal in Animal Eye,” she continued, “trying to see, attempting to understand, and turning to the physical for comfort.”<\/strong> (You can read the full review here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Paisley is not only an accomplished author and professor of creative writing, but a tireless ambassador for the role that literature and story play in the life of a community. A maven of social media, she curates both the Mapping Salt Lake City project and\u00a0Hivemind<\/a>, a city-wide book club that meets once a month to discuss a book by (and sometimes with) visiting writers of the University of Utah Creative Writing Program’s Guest Writers Series.\u00a0<\/span>Utah Humanities’ literature program officer Michael McLane, charged also with community lit programming, says it most succinctly: “Paisley gets it.” <\/span><\/p>\n

At times she’s taken a turn into mixing her intense lyricism with popular culture. In a Reed College interview<\/a> she says,\u00a0<\/span>\u201cWhen I was a kid I was obsessed with Mae West . . . I used to dress up like her all the time . . . I had always seen her as a very uncomplicated and obvious feminist hero, but the more you actually learn about her life and the more you learn about the persona she portrayed, the kind of more complicated that portrait of her feminism becomes.\u201d\u00a0You can watch a killer reading of Paisley’s “Self-Portrait as Mae West Anagram” in the Bite-Size Poetry Series here. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today we feature a sample from Paisley’s forthcoming collection Imaginary Vessels<\/em>, (Copper Canyon) due out in November.<\/p>\n

Enjoy!<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Once<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

white field. And the dog
\ndashing past me
\ninto the blank,<\/p>\n

toward the nothing.
\nOr:
\nnot running anymore but<\/p>\n

this idea of him, still
\nin his gold
\nfur, being<\/p>\n

what I loved him for
\nfirst, so that now
\non the blankets pile<\/p>\n

in one corner
\nof the animal hospital
\nwhere they\u2019ve brought him out<\/p>\n

a final hour, two,
\nbefore the needle
\nwith its cold<\/p>\n

pronouncements,
\nhe trembles with what
\nhe once was: breath<\/p>\n

and muscle puncturing
\nthe snow, sudden
\nstetting over the tips<\/p>\n

of the meadow\u2019s buried
\ngrasses after\u2013what
\nwas it, a rabbit?<\/p>\n

Field mouse? Dashing
\npast me on my skis,
\nfor the first time<\/p>\n

faster, as if
\nhe had been hiding this,
\nhis good uses. What<\/p>\n

a shock to watch
\nwhat you know unfold
\ndeeper into, or out of<\/p>\n

itself. It is like
\nloving an animal:
\nhopeless, an extravagance<\/p>\n

we were meant for:
\nstartled, continually,
\nby what we\u2019re willing<\/p>\n

to feel. The tips
\nof the grasses high
\nin the white. And the flat<\/p>\n

light, drops of water
\non the gold
\ncoat, the red, the needle<\/p>\n

moving in, then out,
\nand now the sound of an animal
\nrushing past me in the snow.<\/p>\n

#<\/p>\n

Copyright, Paisley Rekdal, 2016<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Imaginary<\/a>Paisley Rekdal<\/strong> is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee<\/em>;\u00a0 a hybrid-genre photo-text memoir that combines poetry, fiction, nonfiction and photography entitled Intimate<\/em>; and four books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants,\u00a0 The Invention of the Kaleidoscope,<\/em> and Animal Eye<\/em>, winner of the UNT Rilke Prize.\u00a0 Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. She teaches at the University of Utah and is the creator and editor of the community web history archive project, Mapping Salt Lake City<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Past featured writers in <\/em>15 Bytes\u2019 Sunday Blog Read<\/strong>:<\/strong>\u00a0Katharine Coles<\/a>, Michael McLane<\/a>, Darrell Spencer<\/a>,Larry Menlove<\/a>,Christopher Bigelow<\/a>, Shanan Ballam<\/a>,Steve Proskauer<\/a>,April Wilder<\/a>,Calvin Haul<\/a>, Lance Larsen<\/a>,Joel Long<\/a>,Lynn Kilpatrick<\/a>,Phyllis Barber<\/a>, David Hawkins<\/a>,Nancy Takacs<\/a>,Mike Dorrell<\/a>,Susan Elizabeth Howe<\/a>, Star Coulbrooke<\/a>, Brad Roghaar,<\/a>Jerry Vanleperen<\/a>,Maximilian Werner<\/a>, Markay Brown<\/a>, Natalie Young<\/a>, Michael Sowder<\/a>, Danielle Beazer Dubrasky<\/a>,\u00a0Kevin Holdsworth<\/a>,\u00a0Jacqueline Osherow<\/a>, Stephen Carter<\/a>,\u00a0Alex Caldiero<\/a>,\u00a0Stephen Tuttle<\/a>, Raphael Dagold<\/a>, David Lee<\/a>,\u00a0Lisa Bickmore<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Kirstin Scott<\/a>,\u00a0Jesse Parent<\/a>,\u00a0Craig Dworkin<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Laura Stott<\/a>,\u00a0Jana Richman<\/a>, Melody Newey Johnson<\/a>, C. Wade Bentley<\/a>,\u00a0Amy Brunvand<\/a>, and Janine Joseph<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SUNDAY BLOG READ\u00a0is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah\u2019s literary writers. Each month, 15 Bytes offers works-in-progress and \/ or recently published work by some of the state\u2019s most celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction and memoir. Today we are featuring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1566,"featured_media":33759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":[35,2513],"tags":[26,2908,1778,1301],"class_list":["post-33758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary-arts","category-read-local-first","tag-15-bytes","tag-imaginary-vessels","tag-paisley-rekdal","tag-sunday-blog-read"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/paisley-rekdal-hires-austen-diamond-photography-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-18 07:57:58","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\/33758","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\/1566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33758"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97401,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33758\/revisions\/97401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}