Moon Flogged

by Reka Nyitrai

74 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2024

Reviews

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Réka Nyitrai is a multilingual force. An international enigma. A surrealist soothsayer. A spirit who dreams in droplets of water and embers of bone. Whether writing prose poetry or haiku or (in this case) free verse, her words extend through the wanderlust of the underworld, the hypothetical and the magical, the ambient moment before waking. In the four sections of Moon Flogged, clouds talk, a pigeon becomes a hat, phantoms have ponytails, ants milk cows, and a horse sits in a living room. Husbands and wives flood the pages, a "rotunda of mothers" casually have cameos, and family members twirl around like mice. The vocabulary is simplistic and domestic yet the images are dense and complex, residing inside the absurdist beyond. Leonora Carrington and Gro Dahle chatter through these feminist poems, these hymnals, these chants. If Réka blows out birthday candles, the smoke might be full of crows. See also: wolves. See also: ghosts.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore the poems in Réka Nyitrai’s Moon Flogged. I worship without purpose. I am lost here where loss gets the nothing it deserves. This is the work of a third language. Of an equal. I don’t mean equal as something controlled. I mean an equality built on an erratic focus and condemned by unusual landlords. It’s an expectant nowhere that goes everywhere. The verse here combs like a ghost barber through the hair of those distracted by the abandoned erotica of a neckless god. This is a poetry of visual sense and illogical logistics. Lovely and odd, it’s the alien bird that feathers its spontaneous theft with secondhand keystrokes and it's the domestic fossil brushing for fingerprints rolled across the weak monitors of our projected tenderness. I mean to get carried. Away.