A Crash of Rhinos: Poems

by 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.”

Genres: Poetry, Asian American

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Rekdal 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.

Reviews

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great short volume by a poet I stumbled onto through her work in various literary journals. Her poems manage to be accessible, without sacrificing boldness and uncensored honesty. Many of them are long and narrative in nature and keep the reader's attention all the way through to a fulfilling end, which is not an easy task in longer poetry.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly intelligent, intricately patterned, Paisley Rekdal's narrative line is long while insisting to refer -- like her masters, Larry Levis and Elizabeth Bishop, that weave of re-iteration (the dominant trope) will depend on the poignancy of her rhetorical/dramatic situating of herself to get us re-reading, so that the enactments (the re-iterations) can begin to shift in us up registers of abstraction that move us in wonder and delight. The speaker in Bishop is always poignant -- never not. Rekdal's cultural enthusiasms make a slightly more privileged scene. It is Western, second generation emigre, racially mixed, counter-cultural. Like a number of poets from the Western United States (Rekdal heads the MFA program at Salt Lake), the speaker of "Other People's Success" isn't entirely too sure about this whole poetry thing. That's an apology for an order that's essentially Keatsian, but plays to a public that meets after work to watch the fights.

[Fred Daly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw Paisley Rekdal read a poem at the kickoff to this year's virtual Dodge Poetry Festival, and I was immediately intrigued. In fact, hers was the only poem that grabbed me. I liked this book, even though I didn't always get what she was up to. Her poetry is fiercely intelligent; you get the idea that if she didn't like something you just said, you would be subject to withering scorn. I found it worked to just let the poems roll over me and admire the extravagance of her imagination. Any poet rewards rereading, but she requires it.

[Michael Mcdonough · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are personal and intimate, but at the same time, they are broad, encompassing characters and events from many places and times. A poem with Captain Cook discovering tattoos also has the teenage narrator hiding her tattoo from her mom. A poem about Magellan has the great title “On Getting a Dog and Being told What I Really Want is a Child.” A poem about a Far Side cartoon goes to dark places. Every poem is a surprising journey.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m very glad I read these poems - the poet has a wonderful joyous full-throated approach to life; her life and the life of the world. I love the brilliance of the word play and the thoughtful reflections on life little and large. The poems about tattoos are particularly thought provoking.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4

[Isaac Timm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well hot damn, great collection. The last two are just crazy good.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rekdal's first book, published shortly after graduate school. But that was almost 20 years ago. Lots of people will publish a first book, then almost disappear. She has stayed very active and has become a real presence on the national poetry scene (if there is one). And she has become better, although this is still a remarkable first book.

Two of the blurbs on this book (both written by men) use the word "sexy." That's not dismissive, I think, but it does put the work in a category. I didn't want to use the word, but I looked at the one thing I've written about a later book of hers, and I, too, used the phrase "subdued eroticism." It is hitting me that we still don't have a very rich vocabulary for talking about a poet who is passionately heterosexual. In many ways we've developed a better vocabulary for speaking about queer poetics in the last decade.

And there is an eroticism in Rekdal's poems. It's an important element of the work. Perhaps it's not as important as her engagement with history. Captain Cook, Francis Drake, Magellan, and Francis Bacon (the Elizabethan one), all appear in important long-ish poems in this collection. History is never divorced from the personal history -- the personal is often placed right beside the historical. In fact that may be a touchstone of Rekdal's poems. The interest in history also reaches toward the questions of race and the imposed categories that are implied there. Of course, Rekdal is not the first of contemporary poets to explore racial identity, but when I think that these poems are 20 years old, I have to think that she has exercised a distinct influence on younger poets (which makes her sound old, which she isn't. Not yet).

Throughout her publishing life she has been praised for her long lines, and the way they wind around syntax. That was true even in this early work, although she has become much more fluent in that since. Her language is rich, but it never (or seldom) feels forced into poeticizing. She will use the associate leaps of the contemporary lyric, but her leaps always seem to make sense. She doesn't leave us out on any limbs.

So, all in all, Paisley Rekdal is a poet to follow, and this first collection is one to pay attention to.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

the pink cauliflower of your nipple (5)

watching the sky / inhale your shuttle like a crumb off a plate (47) (Crista McAuliffe)

a knot / of red papers like exposed nerve endings (50)

Favorite of collection: Fire

[Nina Romano · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know why but her titles are not in caps. I love her long sweeping loines and her unusual juxtopostions...