Imaginary Vessels

September 19, 2016
In her subtle and multifaceted fifth
collection, Rekdal (Animal Eye) turns
various receptacles into representations of transience, sustenance, and drive. As the poet mulls motherhood as an imperfect substitute for immortality, a child mourns a burst soap bubble: “They don’t last!” The oyster, meanwhile, contains the pearl within its “labial meats” and the “heart rustles/ in its manila folder.” Rekdal’s
lyrical symbols connect through the ages: “a car inhales the gas/ containing bones of dissolved dinosaurs/ and the cheese breeds mold to heal the cut that holds/ the hurt cradled inside the body.” A series of poems in homage to performer and wit Mae West are as delightfully subversive as their
subject. In the alliterative voice of West, Rekdal advises, “Be belle and ball, too, a deb Coco-labeled;/ be ocelot, be lancet, be candle and cabled.” In another series, inspired by Andrea Modica’s photographs of skulls unearthed from the Colorado Mental Health Institute, Rekdal views the skulls as haunted former residencies of their owners’ shattered psyches. “What dreams remain encased inside this freckled/ gourd, this ostrich egg cradled on cardboard,” she writes. One particular skull resembles the desiccated remains of an armadillo’s shell—abandoned and obsolete. Rekdal’s address of the fundamental fragility at the center of existence possesses a vigor that inspires rereading.

September 15, 2016

In her latest volume, Rekdal, a Guggenheim Fellow and finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize for her collection Animal Eye, proposes that identity can be discerned by the vessel, the container in which the entity is held, whether it be a glass bead, a bubble, or a broken skull. In poems that are sometimes narrative and often lyrical, Rekdal's vessels run the gamut from cages to zippered skirts to pearls and serve to hone readers' perception of beauty, of necessity. "The mussel// become what no one/ wants to: / vessel, caisson, wounded// into making us/ the thing we want/ to call beautiful." The centerpiece of this volume is the series of "devotionals," meditations on Andrea Modica's portraits of skulls discovered at the Colorado Mental Health Institute, bones so old they hold no identity other than gender and age. Rekdal contains these poems as sonnets, reimagining these lost souls as human, as viable. "What dreams, inside this chamber, remain encased?" she muses. Throughout, Rekdal writes mostly in persona, and her characters leap and sing with imagination and music. Mae West, for instance, is recognizable from her humor and sass: "I'm no model lady, you know. A model's just an imitation of the real thing." VERDICT A necessary read for those who appreciate imagery and fine language.--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2016
Rekdal, the author of nine books of essays, presents her fifth collection of poetry, in which she dives into an examination of how identity inhabits a chosen vessel. By partnering poems with 14 photographs by Andrea Modica, both poet and photographer attempt to restore humanity to their subjects. In the poem Vessels, Rekdal uses the image of the mussel to personify pain and the acceptance of pain in order to be beautiful. She writes: It hurts / to imagine it, regardless / of the harvester's / denials, swiveling / his knife to make / the incision: one / dull cyst nicked / from the oyster's / mantle. The astounding strength of each of Rekdal's metaphors mystifies the reader and pulls her deeply into the world each poem creates or expounds upon. This brilliant collection serves as a sort of ground zero for questions and considerations about how we view ourselves in our communities, how we allow ourselves to represent and experience historical trauma, and the burden of placing importance or developing rhetoric around public monuments.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)