Paisley Rekdal

What makes reading a poem unlike reading anything else? In Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens, acclaimed poet and teacher Paisley Rekdal demonstrates how to observe the building blocks of a poem--including its diction, form, imagery, and rhythm--and construct an interpretation of its meaning. Using guided close readings and nearly 40 creative and critical "experiments," this book shows how a poem takes shape through the intersection of all its lyric elements....

""Compelling, appealing, cinematic. Rekdal refreshes the meaning and the image of being displaced in this world."--The Boston Globe "Rekdal's work deeply satisfies, for it witnesses and wonders over the necessary struggles of human awareness and being." -Rain Taxi "In acknowledging the disappointing facts of our existence and singing her way into its amazement, she has created poetry that lives alongside the misery we sometimes witness-and sometimes...

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit...

"A collection of poetry by Paisley Rekdal"--

"For this year's volume, guest editor Paisley Rekdal has selected seventy-five thought-provoking, surprising, unsettling, exhilarating poems."-- Page 4 of cover. The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, proving that this is "a 'best' anthology that really lives up to its title" (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been "one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world" (Academy of American...