When you come from a mixed race background as Paisley Rekdal does her mother is Chinese American and her father is Norwegian thorny issues of identity politics, and interracial desire are never far from the surface. Here in this hypnotic blend of personal essay and travelogue, Rekdal journeys throughout Asia to explore her place in a world where one s appearance is the deciding factor of one s ethnicity.
In her soul-searching voyage, she teaches English in South Korea where her native colleagues call her a hermaphrodite, and is dismissed by her host family in Japan as an American despite...

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...

"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 within the "failed elegy," all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation.

Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly, Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states "It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves."

INTIMATE brilliantly redefines "memoir" by assembling its narratives from divergent sources: the mixed-race marriage of Paisley Rekdal's parents, the life of photographer Edward S. Curtis (chronicler and myth-maker of the Old West), and the almost unknown story of Alexander Upshaw, Curtis's Native American guide and interpreter. Typographically adventurous, Rekdal uses a combination of prose, poetry, and photographs to create a panoramic yet intimate encounter with American history, and a new way of thinking about the riddle of identity.

INTIMATE brilliantly redefines "memoir" by assembling its narratives from divergent sources: the mixed-race marriage of Paisley Rekdal's parents, the life of photographer Edward S. Curtis (chronicler and myth-maker of the Old West), and the almost unknown story of Alexander Upshaw, Curtis's Native American guide and interpreter. Typographically adventurous, Rekdal uses a combination of prose, poetry, and photographs to create a panoramic yet intimate encounter with American history, and a new way of thinking about the riddle of identity.

The Broken County explores the cultural and psychological effects of Vietnam on both Southeast Asian refugees and returning U.S. veterans. Rekdal examines the complicated ways in which we struggle to comprehend and memorialize the war.