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"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.
About the author
Paisley Rekdal is associate professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of three previous poetry collections:
The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, A Crash of Rhinos, and
Six Girls Without Pants, as well as a book of essays,
The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee. She is the recipient of the
Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from
Michigan Quarterly Review, and the 2011Ð2012 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship.
Summary
Once in 1931, fresh from Hong Kong, you posed for the camera in a silk dress, still as if stuffed, aware and not aware the foreign shores were home. Your bobbed locks, I once wrote, impossibly black, a tar waterfall marcelled as if to death - this was the hair we saw on you, not the white, hood-like boy's cap we later cut and pasted to your skull.
