Heritance - Paperback

by Paisley Rekdal (Author)

Writing from a mixed heritage, Paisley Rekdal voices both the sins of our fathers and the suffering of our mothers.

In Paisley Rekdal's latest collection, Heritance, the body and its meanings are ever shifting--it is, at once, a legacy, an obligation, and a means of generating more bodies. Summoning memories of parents, former partners, and children both real and hypothetical, Heritance examines the personal and familial shames we inherit. Can something so ephemeral as memory be owned? In what ways do we become complicit in the political values of our families, our nations, and our chosen--or assumed--communities? Here, Rekdal grapples with the inevitable loss of loved ones and relationships, but also of climate change and social evolution--asking what values do we choose to preserve, and which ones do we reinvent for a new era? And in what ways can art recompense for our personal and cultural wounds? Meditating on race, violence, and lineage, Rekdal challenges the reader to contextualize their perspective within the corporeal, and to question what it means to love outside of "the lens of someone else's imagining."

Author Biography

Paisley Rekdal is the author of five books of nonfiction and seven collections of poetry, including Animal Eye (2012), Imaginary Vessels (2016), Nightingale (2019), and West: A Translation, which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. She is a distinguished professor at the University of Utah, where she teaches in the creative writing program and directs the American West Center. Between 2017-2022, she served as Utah's Poet Laureate, receiving a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. She currently serves as poetry editor for High Country News, and as co-chair of PEN America's Utah Chapter.