A Crash of Rhinos
Paisley Rekdal
In these quizzically probing and provocative poems, atoms and torture, tattoos and laundromats, mug shots, the theory of light, and such personalities as Joe Louis and Bruce Lee join in shaping a simultaneously personal and historical narrative of love, family, and desire. The tension between the public and the private saturates these poems with a breathless energy that carries the reader through Rekdal’s self-aware depiction of American culture and romance, complete with Harlequin romance novels and an account of her parents’ courtship. Though Rekdal delights in turning traditional images of love upside down, what she finally offers is a grateful and graceful view of humanity, which convinces us that, as she says in “Convocation”: “Nothing is a single moment . . . / No private event lacks history.”
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About Paisley Rekdal
Reviews for A Crash of Rhinos
Andrew Hudgins In A Crash of Rhinos reason and the uncensored disclosures of excited speech coexist with astonishing intensity. The American language seems suddenly, single-handedly revitalized. The poems are passionate, sexual, demonic. They are ceaselessly inventive. They are beautiful.
Mark Strand
former Poet Laureate of the United States
What a fabulous and fabular debut . . . The spacious narrative plane of the book is crisscrossed with myriad purposes. Here the tropes of physical science, the tactics of exploration narratives, the rich lineage of literary forebears—and all the risky pleasures of invention—are not just artifacts attached to the poems; rather, they are vitally informing partners to every lyric excursion. Rekdal's large voice is as capable of interrogation as of thunderstruck awe, and her spacious poetic site contains—it requires—chaos as well as shapeliness, irony as well as affection, velocity as well as entropy. If these poems prove that we 'help erode the things we want / to illuminate,' they also resist that proof with every fiber of language.
David Baker