{"id":36041,"date":"2016-12-18T13:58:50","date_gmt":"2016-12-18T19:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=36041"},"modified":"2025-11-12T12:11:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T19:11:12","slug":"vessels-from-a-hindu-goddess-to-mae-west-paisley-rekdals-imaginary-vessels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/vessels-from-a-hindu-goddess-to-mae-west-paisley-rekdals-imaginary-vessels\/","title":{"rendered":"Vessels from a Hindu Goddess to Mae West: Paisley Rekdal’s Imaginary Vessels"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Paisley Rekdal, who won the 2013 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry for\u00a0\u201cAnimal Eye\u201d\u00a0<\/a>(as well as an impressive number of other fancier prizes), has published a new book of poetry with the prestigious Copper Canyon Press. As with her previous books, Imaginary Vessels<\/em>\u00a0is sheer pleasure to read. Words tumble over each other in an exuberance of language that seems effortless, in spite of the fact, or perhaps because of it, that quite a few of her poems have formal structure and rhyme revealing meticulous craft. The book is a poetic concept album, concerned with themes of containers and what\u2019s held inside them, in particular the vessel of the female body.
\nIn the poem titled \u201cVessel\u201d the poet watches a man opening shellfish with a (Freudian) knife, their \u201clabial meats winged open,\u201d and Rekdal feels sympathetic pain:<\/p>\n

The mussels<\/p>\n

become what no one<\/p>\n

wants to:<\/p>\n

vessel, caisson, wounded<\/p>\n

into making us<\/p>\n

the thing we want<\/p>\n

to call beautiful.<\/p>\n

And yet, these poetic vessels also hold more sensual and pleasurable aspects of beauty. The images that unfold in \u201cA Peacock in a Cage\u201d move deftly out of prison walls toward the light and into a sheltering space that protects a sense of privacy and enables a moment of transcendent joy:<\/p>\n

Shaking out its corona of tail feathers is like light<\/p>\n

glowing in a bulb, a man<\/p>\n

dancing inside an elevator<\/p>\n

Two of the five sections within this book are particularly good.<\/p>\n

Section II, \u201cGo West,\u201d offers a group of 14 interrelated poems about Mae West, whose outsized persona becomes a vessel to hold both pervasive stereotypes of women and a strong feminist counterattack. The imagined voice of West, by turns comic and tough (but never wilting or regretful) offers advice on freedom, censorship, marriage, aging and prayer, and in \u201cSelf-Portrait as Mae West One-Liner,\u201d Rekdal even tries to squash herself into Mae West\u2019s wasp-waisted corset:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m no moaning bluet, mountable<\/p>\n

linnet, mumbling nun. I\u2019m<\/p>\n

tangible, I\u2019m gin.<\/p>\n

The other standout is Section IV, \u201cShooting the Skulls: A Wartime Devotional,\u201d a set of ekphrastic responses to photographs of skulls taken by Andrea Modica which are reproduced here on glossy white paper heightening their impact. Although in real life these bones belonged to patients in a Colorado mental-health institution, to Rekdal they evoke images of war\u2014Dong Re Lao, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, a plane shearing into the Pentagon, Lynndie England \u2013 as she pictures her Chinese-American relatives in battle, fighting against people who look like themselves. But mingled with the horror is a delightful sense of graveyard humor. For instance, Rekdal imagines that an incomplete skull, \u201cF20: Male, 29 Years Old,\u201d is a set of \u201cwindup jaws dismantled for the joke,\u201d whose owner might have defended himself by biting the doctors; \u201cPortrait of E4: Male, 34 Years Old,\u201d reminds the poet of a roadkill armadillo with its broken shell taped back together; and \u201cC11: Female, 54 Years Old,\u201d though dead and buried, nonetheless retains a charming sense of vanity:<\/p>\n

Was it envy that made you recollect me, peel off<\/p>\n

my earthworm crown, my negligee of roots?<\/p>\n

The final poem, titled \u201cThe History of Paisley,\u201d ties it all together as the poet seeks at last to inhabit her own name, though in a deliberate irony this poem takes its name from another poem by Agha Shahid Ali. Ali attributes the paisley design to the Hindu goddess Parvati who once became so enraged at her husband Shiva that her footprints scorched the earth with the form of teardrops. In myth, the two deities eventually reconciled, and so the Paisley motif woven into fabric becomes a symbol of reconciliation and the healing power of tears. This final poem offers the sheltering power contained in a name, echoing the ever self-assured Mae West who declared, \u201cDiamond Lil is all mine. I\u2019m she. She\u2019s I,\u201d<\/p>\n

My name is Paisley. Your name is Paisley as well.<\/p>\n

The softened thunder sounds its distant footsteps.<\/p>\n

It is raining in the vales of Kashmir, Scotland, Utah.<\/p>\n

Beloved, let us watch, and get our faces wet.<\/p>\n

Come: let us sit together under this shawl.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Imaginary Vessels<\/em>
\nPaisley Rekdal<\/em>
\nCopper Canyon Press<\/a><\/em>
\n2016<\/em>
\n119 p.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paisley Rekdal, who won the 2013 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry for\u00a0\u201cAnimal Eye\u201d\u00a0(as well as an impressive number of other fancier prizes), has published a new book of poetry with the prestigious Copper Canyon Press. As with her previous books, Imaginary Vessels\u00a0is sheer pleasure to read. Words […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1518,"featured_media":47676,"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":[2589,35],"tags":[3785],"class_list":["post-36041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-andrea-modica"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/Imaginary-Vessels-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-27 20:29:40","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\/36041","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\/1518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36041"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98540,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36041\/revisions\/98540"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}