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Nightingale
Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. In Nightingale, a mother undergoes cancer treatments at the same time her daughter transitions into a son; a woman comes to painful terms with her new sexual life after becoming quadriplegic; a photographer wonders whether her art is to blame for her son’s sudden illness; and a widow falls in love with her dead husband’s dog. At the same time, however, the book includes more intimate lyrics that explore personal transformation, culminating in a series of connected poems that trace the continuing effects of sexual violence and rape on survivors. Nightingale updates many of Ovid’s subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.
96 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 7, 2019
29 people are currently reading
601 people want to read
About the author
Paisley Rekdal
25 books96 followersRekdal grew up in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of a Chinese American mother and a Norwegian father. She earned a BA from the University of Washington, an MA from the University of Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of the poetry collections A Crash of Rhinos (2000), Six Girls Without Pants (2002), and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (2007) as well as the book of essays The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000).
In reviewing The Invention of the Kaleidoscope for Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson observed that it’s “the razor’s edge that always accompanies eros that makes the poems of Paisley Rekdal fresh, intense and ultimately irresistible.” Rekdal’s work grapples with issues of race, sexuality, myth, and identity while often referencing contemporary culture.
Rekdal has been honored with a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah.
In reviewing The Invention of the Kaleidoscope for Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson observed that it’s “the razor’s edge that always accompanies eros that makes the poems of Paisley Rekdal fresh, intense and ultimately irresistible.” Rekdal’s work grapples with issues of race, sexuality, myth, and identity while often referencing contemporary culture.
Rekdal has been honored with a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
April 14, 2023
really solid transformation poems. the trans rep could be better, not a fan of misgendering on purpose.
May 5, 2024
EDIT REREAD 2024: THE question (are words enough?)
review from 2020: i feel weird giving star ratings to poetry collections, so i’m not going to. some of these were excellent. others i was completely indifferent to. (sorry that’s my incredibly enlightening review—ganymede and nightingale: a gloss were the ones that stood out to me the most.)
review from 2020: i feel weird giving star ratings to poetry collections, so i’m not going to. some of these were excellent. others i was completely indifferent to. (sorry that’s my incredibly enlightening review—ganymede and nightingale: a gloss were the ones that stood out to me the most.)
January 25, 2022
This collection is much like the pear: pale, crisp, sometimes juicy and fragrant, often dry and elusive in flavour.
the cool flesh
cellular or stony, white
as the belly of the winter hare
or the doe's scut, flicking,
before she mates. (Pear)
The cover is a gorgeous trace of the poems: the body, often female, made into art or seized or looked intimately upon or showing up in blank, stark language.
Perhaps the greatest desire a victim of violence has is to look at the violence dispassionately in memory. But remembering, the heart pounds, the body floods with adrenaline, ready to tear back off into flight... Poetry, with its suggestions that time and pain can be ordered through language, strains to constrain suffering. It suggests, but rarely achieves, the redress we desire. (Nightingale)
Paisley Rekdal writes a wonderful story. At the level of craft, she is a strong writer, intelligent and controlled in recited passages and original images—I have studied Ovid’s Philomela, and took some interest in Rekdal’s theory-driven personalization of the myth. But the poems that her stories take the form of are many times washed away, without closing or reaching their climax. Without spreading completely. Some of them attempt newness through the unusual body, another kind of metamorphosis: I didn’t like how “Io” approached disability, I wasn’t sure about where “Tireseus” was growing from.
I did like it, but the joy and longing I had from the five or six poems that ignited my senses—
The tree traffics
in a singular astonishment, its gold tongues
lolling out a song so rich and sweet, the notes
are left to rot upon the pavement. (Psalm (!!))
—wasn’t satisfied by the rest.
The best (for me):
Psalm
Four Marys
Nightingale
The Olive Tree at Vouves
Driving to Santa Fe
Pear
the cool flesh
cellular or stony, white
as the belly of the winter hare
or the doe's scut, flicking,
before she mates. (Pear)
The cover is a gorgeous trace of the poems: the body, often female, made into art or seized or looked intimately upon or showing up in blank, stark language.
Perhaps the greatest desire a victim of violence has is to look at the violence dispassionately in memory. But remembering, the heart pounds, the body floods with adrenaline, ready to tear back off into flight... Poetry, with its suggestions that time and pain can be ordered through language, strains to constrain suffering. It suggests, but rarely achieves, the redress we desire. (Nightingale)
Paisley Rekdal writes a wonderful story. At the level of craft, she is a strong writer, intelligent and controlled in recited passages and original images—I have studied Ovid’s Philomela, and took some interest in Rekdal’s theory-driven personalization of the myth. But the poems that her stories take the form of are many times washed away, without closing or reaching their climax. Without spreading completely. Some of them attempt newness through the unusual body, another kind of metamorphosis: I didn’t like how “Io” approached disability, I wasn’t sure about where “Tireseus” was growing from.
I did like it, but the joy and longing I had from the five or six poems that ignited my senses—
The tree traffics
in a singular astonishment, its gold tongues
lolling out a song so rich and sweet, the notes
are left to rot upon the pavement. (Psalm (!!))
—wasn’t satisfied by the rest.
The best (for me):
Psalm
Four Marys
Nightingale
The Olive Tree at Vouves
Driving to Santa Fe
Pear
August 16, 2019
Paisley Rekdal’s poetry collection Nightingale is a remarkable work. Her craft, voice, and skill are, of course, outstanding. I’ve been a fan of her work for a longtime, so that didn’t surprise me. But what I did not expect was how gut-wrenching, honest, and disabling some of these poems were. In some, I was left struck and stunned by the power of her imagery and the unrelenting courage of writing so close to the boundary between sublime artistry and grace, and the raw brutality and horror that appears suddenly out of the sidelines of life’s experience. All the poems were vital. Every one of them.
These poems deserve attention. They draw on ancient tales and myths, yes, but they seem for this moment. Now. Listen to what she says, and, oh my, how she says it.
These poems deserve attention. They draw on ancient tales and myths, yes, but they seem for this moment. Now. Listen to what she says, and, oh my, how she says it.
December 28, 2019
More poetry! And it seems my friend did right by me, because Nightingale was captivating. The fact that Rekdal took inspiration from Ovid's Metamorphoses is what really interested me, and those poems based in part around myth were my favorite. I had a little trouble connecting to the beginning (a problem I usually have), but then everything sort of clicked and took off for the better. Some poems, though, didn't entirely seem to fit in my opinion; then again, I've never actually read Ovid before.
How could anyone
love me [...]
if I'm not entirely myself?
How could anyone
love me [...]
if I'm not entirely myself?
September 29, 2023
The Philomela sequence and the following poem and analysis was just amazing. Such a great piece.
July 21, 2019
A magnificent collection of poems, many of them in conversation with classical mythologies. Rekdal has long been a powerful lyric poet. Poems like "Psalm" and "Pear" only enhance her reputation there. But the hybrid centerpiece "Nightingale: A Gloss" and the sonnet sequence "Gokstadt/Ganymede"lift this remarkable collection to even greater heights. Rekdal has an astonishing gift for making the profane read as sacred, for transforming our darkest pain into art. Highly recommended.
April 16, 2019
stunning work, especially parts ii and iii, especially when read together. (4.5)
October 15, 2020
TW: Sexaul Assualt
So, I confess - I've never read Ovid's Metamorphoses. However, I don't feel like that fact greatly hampered my enjoyment of this collection. Being unfamiliar with some of the myths and relationships at play in over-arching metaphors meant I had to look them up, which gave me time to linger over these poems more than I probably would have done if I knew what was what.
This collection is a stunner. Individual retellings of Ovid's myths are tied together with an unwinding reflection on the concept/metaphor/linguistic/literary implications of the nightingale that peaks in the poem "Nightingale: A Gloss". This stand-out prose poem takes up a staggering 17 pages at the center of the book and puts every page to good use. Rekdal uses this poem to reflect on other writings in the collection, her own writing process, the aftermath of sexual assault, and the poet's perpetual desire to parse the flesh of language and find its stone heart. My experience with Rekdal's writing in this collection exists in a chasm of resisting opposites - never has a writer made me feel such a potent cocktail of intimacy and alienation. Rekdal is here to tell you that language, a tool universally employed to bring order to concepts and express those concepts to others, falls short when addressing some of the most pivotal acts of violence and transcendence we experience as human beings. Our language is a failure in recounting the act, leaving us instead with negatives of our own experiences.
Nevertheless, Rekdal does provide the reader with some sense of justice in pieces like "Philomela", which sprouts discomfort between its lines like a garden and then blooms to a soothing/seething finish with the gift of a sewing machine and time. In "Gokstadt/Ganymede", Rekdal admits uncomfortable truths about trauma with a nakedness that is embarrassing and unequivocal: "When you sensed, what I hated:/some part of me loved you, not in spite of,/but because you had been raped.", that brings the reader into the darkness of loving while hurting and loving while healing.
Perhaps the most easily overlooked thing about this collection is the steady, elegant language that wraps itself around each piece, sometimes comforting, sometimes suffocating. This gift for the subtle image is apparent in many of Rekdal's pieces, but I enjoyed it most in "Telling the Wasps":
And so I fell among the wasps, whispering
your name into the hole I scooped
beside the marshy winter creek, where wind
now scours the freezing water. Where reed
on broken reed hums its numb refrain,
and love turns in its mud home, and sleeps.
So, I confess - I've never read Ovid's Metamorphoses. However, I don't feel like that fact greatly hampered my enjoyment of this collection. Being unfamiliar with some of the myths and relationships at play in over-arching metaphors meant I had to look them up, which gave me time to linger over these poems more than I probably would have done if I knew what was what.
This collection is a stunner. Individual retellings of Ovid's myths are tied together with an unwinding reflection on the concept/metaphor/linguistic/literary implications of the nightingale that peaks in the poem "Nightingale: A Gloss". This stand-out prose poem takes up a staggering 17 pages at the center of the book and puts every page to good use. Rekdal uses this poem to reflect on other writings in the collection, her own writing process, the aftermath of sexual assault, and the poet's perpetual desire to parse the flesh of language and find its stone heart. My experience with Rekdal's writing in this collection exists in a chasm of resisting opposites - never has a writer made me feel such a potent cocktail of intimacy and alienation. Rekdal is here to tell you that language, a tool universally employed to bring order to concepts and express those concepts to others, falls short when addressing some of the most pivotal acts of violence and transcendence we experience as human beings. Our language is a failure in recounting the act, leaving us instead with negatives of our own experiences.
Nevertheless, Rekdal does provide the reader with some sense of justice in pieces like "Philomela", which sprouts discomfort between its lines like a garden and then blooms to a soothing/seething finish with the gift of a sewing machine and time. In "Gokstadt/Ganymede", Rekdal admits uncomfortable truths about trauma with a nakedness that is embarrassing and unequivocal: "When you sensed, what I hated:/some part of me loved you, not in spite of,/but because you had been raped.", that brings the reader into the darkness of loving while hurting and loving while healing.
Perhaps the most easily overlooked thing about this collection is the steady, elegant language that wraps itself around each piece, sometimes comforting, sometimes suffocating. This gift for the subtle image is apparent in many of Rekdal's pieces, but I enjoyed it most in "Telling the Wasps":
And so I fell among the wasps, whispering
your name into the hole I scooped
beside the marshy winter creek, where wind
now scours the freezing water. Where reed
on broken reed hums its numb refrain,
and love turns in its mud home, and sleeps.
July 16, 2022
I enjoyed reading this so much. It was dark and violent and sad. It was loss and pain and grief and desire and longing. And it was fucking clever as hell, the way that she used the literary allusions / mythology, especially the Ovid. My favorite poems were "Nightingale: A Gloss" (which also plays with the Romantics, of course) and "Pear" but I also really, really loved "Four Marys," "Philomela," "Gokstadt/ Ganymede," "Marsyas," "Driving to Santa Fe" and "Pythagorean."
From Nightingale:
Is the metonym, finally, for Philomela art, or silence, or raving? Later
poets' use of the nightingale suggests she is apt able to sing about and
against suffering, but Ovid never mentions song. Instead, he symbolizes
Philomela and Procne by the murder of Itys: "And even so the red marks
of the murder/ stayed on their breasts: the feathers were blood-colored."
What is our longing to hear Philomela's song but our own desire for
retributive justice?....
What if it is the form, not the content, of The Metamorphoses that is
the terror? Each story unfolding into another, perpetually disrupting,
thus delaying the ending? What if, because we came to listen, we are the
reason the story keeps not ending? Why should Philomela sing, when our
presence only increases her suffering?
.....
In life, time's passage allows us to see ourselves change, but a poem's
chronology forces us to see repetition: lyrics time is not progressive but
fragmentary and recursive. Traumatic time works like lyric time....
Mourning is merely the process by which we remain frozen: the birds
always in flight, the hoopoe continually in pursuit....
The nightingale hovers between trauma and memory, its song meant to
bring one into concert with the other, to integrate event into narrative, to
bring pain out of the body and into language. But the song isn't heard, it's
longed for....
I have spent my life devoted to an art whose foundational symbol is one
of unspeakable violence. Did I seek poetry out for this? Or was I, that
day in the woods, made into a poet? Perhaps, whether we are changed
into our opposites or shrunk into the form that best defines us, some part
of transformation is always a curse.
From Nightingale:
Is the metonym, finally, for Philomela art, or silence, or raving? Later
poets' use of the nightingale suggests she is apt able to sing about and
against suffering, but Ovid never mentions song. Instead, he symbolizes
Philomela and Procne by the murder of Itys: "And even so the red marks
of the murder/ stayed on their breasts: the feathers were blood-colored."
What is our longing to hear Philomela's song but our own desire for
retributive justice?....
What if it is the form, not the content, of The Metamorphoses that is
the terror? Each story unfolding into another, perpetually disrupting,
thus delaying the ending? What if, because we came to listen, we are the
reason the story keeps not ending? Why should Philomela sing, when our
presence only increases her suffering?
.....
In life, time's passage allows us to see ourselves change, but a poem's
chronology forces us to see repetition: lyrics time is not progressive but
fragmentary and recursive. Traumatic time works like lyric time....
Mourning is merely the process by which we remain frozen: the birds
always in flight, the hoopoe continually in pursuit....
The nightingale hovers between trauma and memory, its song meant to
bring one into concert with the other, to integrate event into narrative, to
bring pain out of the body and into language. But the song isn't heard, it's
longed for....
I have spent my life devoted to an art whose foundational symbol is one
of unspeakable violence. Did I seek poetry out for this? Or was I, that
day in the woods, made into a poet? Perhaps, whether we are changed
into our opposites or shrunk into the form that best defines us, some part
of transformation is always a curse.
August 11, 2019
Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Direct link to this review can be found here.
As always, a copy of this book was provided by the publisher or author in exchange for my honest review. This does not effect my opinion in any way.
You never forget your first encounter with a good poet. Nightingale proves this. When I read it, a few months back, I found myself wanting to take it slowly. Savor it. Because, Paisley Rekdal writes in a way that is smooth, in depth and completely moving. There were a few poems I wasn't terribly keen on but for the most part, there was so much good in Nightingale.
If ever there were a perfect place to start with one's work, a real introduction to their core, this is it. I'm glad mine was with Nightingale--I will be reading more by Rekdal in the future. It is beautifully written, completely captivating and art in its truest form.
What I liked most about this collection was the ties to mythology. Everything felt in place. Raw. It felt like exploring something new and feeling something new. Every inch of Nightingale is a revelation and worth the read. Although it is short, it is certainly biting and will leave its mark on you in the long run. What an unforgettable collection.
As always, a copy of this book was provided by the publisher or author in exchange for my honest review. This does not effect my opinion in any way.
You never forget your first encounter with a good poet. Nightingale proves this. When I read it, a few months back, I found myself wanting to take it slowly. Savor it. Because, Paisley Rekdal writes in a way that is smooth, in depth and completely moving. There were a few poems I wasn't terribly keen on but for the most part, there was so much good in Nightingale.
If ever there were a perfect place to start with one's work, a real introduction to their core, this is it. I'm glad mine was with Nightingale--I will be reading more by Rekdal in the future. It is beautifully written, completely captivating and art in its truest form.
What I liked most about this collection was the ties to mythology. Everything felt in place. Raw. It felt like exploring something new and feeling something new. Every inch of Nightingale is a revelation and worth the read. Although it is short, it is certainly biting and will leave its mark on you in the long run. What an unforgettable collection.
July 4, 2024
I found this work a hard collection of poetry to know what I thought about it. Part of the problem may be the fact that I've never read Ovid's Metamorphoses, but I'm not sure how much that plays into it. As I come away from this collection of poetry, it was more how the work made me feel that has me so mixed about it.
Nightingale is a work that left me feeling melancholy afterward. On the one hand to bring such feeling forth is a powerful ability, but on the other I can't say that I really enjoyed feeling that way after reading. I felt like the world was a place with little hope but to continue its acts of violence and loss, and that little hope was left closed in Pandora's box, an idea whispered, but never able to be grasped.
That's not to say I didn't like a number of the poems in the collection, as I did. Psalm, Telling the Wasps, Marsyas, The Olive Trees at Vouves, and Pear were probably my favorite. While I did think the message behind Philomela and Nightingale: A Gloss were powerful, I didn't enjoy it quite as much as some of the other works here.
I feel like I should enjoy this collection more, but as of right now I do not. Maybe I will have to revisit it again later on and see how it sits, but at this moment I am firmly mixed. I see Paisley Rekdal's talent, but I can't say I found the experience fully enjoyable either.
Nightingale is a work that left me feeling melancholy afterward. On the one hand to bring such feeling forth is a powerful ability, but on the other I can't say that I really enjoyed feeling that way after reading. I felt like the world was a place with little hope but to continue its acts of violence and loss, and that little hope was left closed in Pandora's box, an idea whispered, but never able to be grasped.
That's not to say I didn't like a number of the poems in the collection, as I did. Psalm, Telling the Wasps, Marsyas, The Olive Trees at Vouves, and Pear were probably my favorite. While I did think the message behind Philomela and Nightingale: A Gloss were powerful, I didn't enjoy it quite as much as some of the other works here.
I feel like I should enjoy this collection more, but as of right now I do not. Maybe I will have to revisit it again later on and see how it sits, but at this moment I am firmly mixed. I see Paisley Rekdal's talent, but I can't say I found the experience fully enjoyable either.
September 29, 2021
I've got maybe four Paisley Rekdal books. I always love her voice, her sensibility, her raw intellectualism, but this one was gentler in places it seemed, as when the book starts off with absolute tenderness towards a neighborhood tree. There is already a kind of short story empathy and range of characters guided my wisdom and myth that are very heart and body forward. But when we get to "Philomela," and even more directly, the "Nightingale: a gloss" after that, all the tenderness, and hope, and reconstructions of pain hit me hard. Rekdal layers what she says and what she doesn't say with what myth and raped women in myth, and the Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and Robert Lowell that follow with their own recreations, and what their women say and don't say, along with song and what it does, and the male poetic tradition relying on an original sexual violence, and Paisley there in Scotland, and Paisley at a writer's retreat, afraid and reflecting, following in a tradition of poetic allusion and silence.
February 10, 2020
In addition to Hannah Sullivan's Three Poems, I highly recommend this book, beautiful and wounded and powerful and profound. Nightingale reimagines many of the myths in Ovid's Metamorphoses through what seems to be a personal narrative. The book is centered by "Nightingale: A Gloss", a poem structured as its own gloss or concordance, about a rape, its aftermath, and its roots across literatures, languages, and cultures. Rape as brutal act and legend weaves through nearly every poem in the book, as does the nightingale, as it sings and as it is silenced. And the long poem Gokstadt/Ganymede is a wrenching elegy to a man whose secret life is evoked by the ruin of an ancient Viking barge. I re-read Nightingale many times and will long remember poem after poem in this book.
Read
May 25, 2020Paisley Rekdal's Nightingale hits on all the elements of great poetry: bravely analytical, historical, soulful, and daring. I felt my heart and mind open as I read through these poems which reimagine Greek mythology and other myths in contemporary settings. This book provoked me to think and feel differently about such intimate subjects as sexual violence, our bodies, and grief. The book also blurs genres through a lyric essay section. I've been a fan of Rekdal's for over a decade and have enjoyed other collections of hers, such as The Invention of the Kaleidoscope. Go slow with this collection and savor its rigor and scope.
November 16, 2023
There were only a couple (and I’m being generous) pieces that really moved me. I always thought no matter the time period, or knowledge art and especially poetry should captivate and thwart their readers into feelings. Not saying I didn’t feel anything but I couldn’t connect to any of these pieces in the way poetry and spoken word has captured me over the years. It just didn’t give me much of anything and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m not familiar with the myths she rewrote except for one or two. But still I would expect to gain some sort of perspective or feeling about those works and the writing didn’t take me there.
March 22, 2020
This is a difficult but rewarding book of poetry by Utah's state poet laureate. Much of it focuses on the gods' bad behavior, but the central section (and the collection's namesake) is a raw and affecting treatment of sexual violation that feels righteously unrelenting and (appropriately) incomplete. It rewards patient reading, but by no means lacks for emotionally compelling content. Indeed, it overflows with it. This will not be a favorite of formalists, but for those who like a carefully controlled, etched voice that is as good as formal structure, this volume will make lots of sense.
October 14, 2020
“It was built into the equation of any body:
the waning mind, waning desire, the flicker
of a life just fading into the distance.”
these poems are absolutely stunning. Rekdal captures human transformation and feminine pain in a really raw and empathetic way. “Four Marys” was a really imaginative look at perspective and was very powerful for me. But I think “Nightengale: A Gloss” and “Gokstadt/Ganymede” are just perfect. This is a book of poems meant to read together, it simply wraps you up and pulls you into prose that is equally imaginative as it is heartbreaking.
the waning mind, waning desire, the flicker
of a life just fading into the distance.”
these poems are absolutely stunning. Rekdal captures human transformation and feminine pain in a really raw and empathetic way. “Four Marys” was a really imaginative look at perspective and was very powerful for me. But I think “Nightengale: A Gloss” and “Gokstadt/Ganymede” are just perfect. This is a book of poems meant to read together, it simply wraps you up and pulls you into prose that is equally imaginative as it is heartbreaking.
October 21, 2022
'In life, time’s passage allows us to see ourselves change, but a poem’s chronology forces us to see repetition: lyric time is not progressive but fragmentary and recursive. Traumatic time works like lyric time: the now of terror repeatedly breaking back through the crust of one’s consciousness. Mourning the wound becomes an obsessive love of the lost. Mourning is merely the process by which we remain frozen: the birds always in flight, the hoopoe continually in pursuit. O, could our mourning ease thy misery!'
(‘Nightangle: A Gloss’, p51)
(‘Nightangle: A Gloss’, p51)
June 3, 2019
Poems with a purpose, reflecting on life's perturbations. Some weighty subjects here including an 8-10 page treatise on the treatment of rape as seen in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Contemporary but with enough classical spicing to structure the thinking - best exhibited by the references to the nightingale - "a poet is a nightingale who sits in the darkness". These are well thought out pieces which need focused attention.
October 3, 2019
This book haunts me, and I love every word. "Nightingale: A Gloss," which I read elsewhere first, is what I came for, but section III, "Quiver," "Gokstadt/Ganymede," and "Telling the Wasps," also held me rapt, gutted me. "Driving to Santa Fe" stitched me back together in some respects, but every poem touched me in some way. The book's construction is also a masterwork in organization, amplification, flow.
November 23, 2025
Read this for class and I am happy it was put under my radar. The themes of these poems are super intense and emotional and i love the focus on transformation. I found myself relating to a lot especially focusing on healing myself rn, but I won't lie a lot of these poems did leave a lot more to be desired for me. I would enjoy the concepts/ideas but some poems I felt went nowhere and left me confused. There are still many powerful poems here though especially Nightingale, a gloss.
June 21, 2019
Outstanding, accomplished poetry. Not the easiest of reads...I spent time reading long central poem thinking no-no-no, please do not reach the actions you just know will unfold in some way. A bit devastating
for the reader...how much more so for the poet to write. Short lists for Pulitzer, Nation Book Award need to have this title.
for the reader...how much more so for the poet to write. Short lists for Pulitzer, Nation Book Award need to have this title.
September 4, 2020
I am very glad I read these poems. The most arresting thing of all was the long poem in the middle bit in and around an assault the poet recounts. It’s impossible to describe in this review except to say that it seems amazing and perfect and painful and true. The rest are quite good. But that one - Wow!
November 5, 2019
As always with Paisley Rekdal's poetry, gorgeous and heady. But this collection is also a bit more emotional/haunting, mostly because of the subject matter of many of these poems, which is violence, death, betrayal, etc.
Highly recommended. I will be rereading some of these I am sure.
Highly recommended. I will be rereading some of these I am sure.
January 1, 2021
On my thesis list. A difficult read. Felt it required knowledge of myth that I simply lacked. Tough subject matter too. Long poems with less lyricism than I typically enjoy. It was a collection I had to work for.
November 15, 2025
“Philomela” and “Nightingale: A Gloss” were the focus poems for my class, in response to Shakespeares Titus Andronicus, and Shelley’s Frankenstein. But many of the poems within this little book were as profound as those two. The Four Mary’s was haunting.
May 26, 2019
An accomplished and impressive poet.
September 30, 2020
Obsessed with Paisley Rekdal
January 31, 2021
Dazzling.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews