Books by Paisley Rekdal

Uses a violent incident that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012 as a springboard for examining the long-term cultural and psychological effects of the Vietnam War. Paisley Rekdal draws on a range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and by American-born veterans.

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost.

This collection of probing and provocative poems touch on atoms and torture, tattoos and laundromats, and the theory of light as they join in shaping a simultaneously personal and historical narrative of love, family and desire.