Paisley rekdal biography of michael
•
A Story About Power
In this one, she is twenty, dating
a thirty-two-year-old debut novelist,
they work at the same tutoring center
at the college where she’s studying
to be a writer, he is not faculty
but a returned Peace Corps volunteer, he has
soft, rumpled hair, soft hands, a body
like a worn-down couch that smells of the American
Spirits he keeps tucked
in a back pocket, he likes
the novels of Toni Morrison and when
she wins the Nobel he tells the young woman, You
could do that too, someday, saying it
quietly, seriously, so she takes him home,
they are laughing, he touches her hair,
her ears, he kisses her shoulder
left out like one pale breadcrumb
for his mouth to find, they go
to bed, she wakes up giddy, calls a friend
who clucks and asks, Don’t you know
he’s still with X? X being the second-
oldest tutor at their center, the one
with wild pink hair and miniskirts
and a habit of vacuuming up tables
with her nose; of course, the you
•
Poem of the Week | June 16, 2014
Paisley Rekdal: "C4: male, 74 years-old"
This week we’re featuring a new poem by Paisley Rekdal. Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text memoir that combines poetry, fiction, nonfiction and photography entitled Intimate; and kvartet books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye, which was a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize.
Author’s note:
In 1993, hundreds of skeletons were unearthed from the grounds of The Colorado State Mental Institution, tagged and numbered over the years by the late forensic anthropologist Dr. J. Michael Hoffman. While little to nothing fryst vatten known about the individuals interred in the grounds, several of the skulls bore marks of syphilis, and were likely the remains of patients who had been abandone
•
Paisley Rekdal has joined High Country News as the publication’s poetry editor — the first person to hold that role in a very long time. She is the author of 10 books, including poetry collections Animal Eye, Imaginary Vessels and Nightingale, as well as nonfiction, including a collection of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, and most recently, Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines the debate around cultural appropriation and the literary imagination. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and on National Public Radio, and she has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and Pushcart Prizes. She’s also the creator and managing editor for Mapping Literary Utah, a web archive of Utah writers, and Mapping Salt Lake City, which maps communities and neighborhoods of Salt Lake City through critical and creative literature, interactive maps, and multimedia projec