Paisley Rekdal Journalist Profile

Articles

REAL TOADS, IMAGINARY GARDENS

Oct 22, 2024 | kirkusreviews.com | Paisley Rekdal |Steve Martin |Harry Bliss |Amy Tan

Wise words about how we can become better readers. A professor’s guide to understanding the craft of poetry.
Intimacy by Paisley Rekdal

Jun 18, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Paisley Rekdal

How horrible it is, how horrible that Cronenberg film where Goldblum’s trapped with a fly inside his Material Transformer: bits of the man emerging gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly worrying that his agent’s screwed him— I almost flinch to see the body later that’s left its fly in the corner, I mean the fly that’s left its body, recalling too that medieval nightmare, Resurrection, in which each soul must scurry to rejoin the plush interiors of its flesh, pushing through, marrying...
Terrace

May 15, 2024 | yahoo.com | Paisley Rekdal

Paisley RekdalMay 15, 2024 at 5:29 PM·1 min readOf this town once built from redwoods trekkedfrom the cold Sierras, nothing’s left. Just bitsof aqueduct lost by the roundhouse, an outlineridge of knuckled barrows, glass chips violetfrom a century of sun. Fists of clinker,and on the berm’s west side, the ghostly hollowsof Chinese dugouts whose perimeter I traceaccording to the wreckage. Shatteredwhiskey bottles.
Lake Effect - Orion Magazine

May 8, 2024 | orionmagazine.org | Paisley Rekdal

Chionophilia: a longing for snow. Sirens shatter through my windows, blue and red, the color of a headache. Frontogenesis:zones of air pressure and temperatures strengthening. An hour ago, I drove by the lake, waved past by police. I’m not telling you anything you can’t find out yourself. I live close to what produces its own weather, warmthdesalinated into crystals that melt the packed ice of our streets.
Fledgling Cooper’s Hawks — Switchyard

Nov 13, 2023 | switchyardmag.com | Taylor Le |Paisley Rekdal

By Paisley RekdalOnce, there were three. Now only twosurvive, the third’s sawtooth comb of bloodfeathering the walk. Still, its nestmates call and call. To drive it backto them. To locate themselves against its answer,their safety. No answer. I watched that one, once-living hawk paste itself to my gutter, mothwings drooping as its thin claws scrabbled at the metal,the long neck pulsing uselesslywith hunger— Didn’t it seemlike a gift at firstto watch these hawks become themselves?
The 2023 National Book Awards Longlists Have Been Announced

Sep 15, 2023 | bookriot.com | Paisley Rekdal |Charif Shanahan |Jenny Erpenbeck |Michael Hofmann

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. The National Book Foundation, on September 13–15, announced the longlists for the 2023 National Book Awards.
“What Is the Smell of a Circle?”

May 29, 2023 | newyorker.com | Paisley Rekdal

Breast milk, yes, and tomato soup, freshalgae blooming on the pond with onecarp quickening its surface. The egg-colored rug on which snow slowly meltedfrom our boots. I rememberthe slowness of the hour in whichwe answered all the questionsour marriage counsellor put to us. Imagine one of you has gotten sick. Imagine the schoolsyou want your children educated in.
“Soil,” a Poem by Paisley Rekdal

May 19, 2023 | lithub.com | Paisley Rekdal

Brigham Young to General Dodge of the Union Pacific, 1869The locusts’ hum, at first, was like a line of flame;then the air burst into reds, silver-edgedand filled with mouths like snapping scissors. They ate our wheat, blacked out the skiesuntil the falling bodies settled like a fogover Great Salt Lake, the carcasses brinedto a black and growing wall. We thoughtthe soil here was rich.
West: A Translation

May 17, 2023 | publishersweekly.com | Maureen N. McLane |Paisley Rekdal |Airea D. Matthews |Jorie Graham

Paisley Rekdal. Copper Canyon, $22 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-55659-656-8In her commanding latest, Rekdal (Nightingale) incorporates various languages, historical documents, photographs, and other primary source texts. It reevaluates American history, linking the completion of the transcontinental railroad to the establishment of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which remained in effect from 1882 to 1943.
The wisdom of squirrels

May 16, 2023 | deseret.com | Paisley Rekdal

This morning I called my father in Seattle to talk about the fox squirrels I found tearing the meat off the one peach our sapling managed to grow. I got so mad, I told him, that I took my shoe off and threw it. The squirrels exploded off the tree's fragile branches, snapping off limbs in the process. My father grunted. "I didn't think they ate peaches," he said. "They don't," I replied.