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Heritance
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."
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."
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 15, 2026
About the author
Paisley Rekdal
26 books103 followersRekdal grew up in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of a Chinese American mother and a Norwegian father. She earned a BA from the University of Washington, an MA from the University of Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of the poetry collections A Crash of Rhinos (2000), Six Girls Without Pants (2002), and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (2007) as well as the book of essays The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000).
In reviewing The Invention of the Kaleidoscope for Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson observed that it’s “the razor’s edge that always accompanies eros that makes the poems of Paisley Rekdal fresh, intense and ultimately irresistible.” Rekdal’s work grapples with issues of race, sexuality, myth, and identity while often referencing contemporary culture.
Rekdal has been honored with a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah.
In reviewing The Invention of the Kaleidoscope for Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson observed that it’s “the razor’s edge that always accompanies eros that makes the poems of Paisley Rekdal fresh, intense and ultimately irresistible.” Rekdal’s work grapples with issues of race, sexuality, myth, and identity while often referencing contemporary culture.
Rekdal has been honored with a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 17, 2026
I loved reading Heritance.
Much of the book is written in the shadow of Paisley Rekdal’s father dying or dead. In the title poem, and in many of the works, Rekdal reflects on what we pass on and hope will be understood as love, when so much is twisted and uncertain in our own path to love, to create, to remember: In “Heritance,” Thomas fantasizes the money he will pass on, “who believes money is love” (105), when he passes on a tenderness often absent in his drunken ageing as now he wonders “over the hummingbirds in his garden.” The poet writes “I could weep to see / such tenderness in him” (105), because she has also inherited the small cruelties of the intellect, all “those poisons I drank / and still drink” (103, “The Choice”).
Heritance is full of desire and grief and ambition, as an observer, an artist, a viewer, a daughter, an historian and student, as an aggrieved, a pretender, a conciliator, a woman, a bridge over race and culture. Rekdal compassionates the dead and sees the child in the father, all he inherited and all he passed on.
Many poems are inflected by war and family serving in them. The most powerful of these for me is the poem sharing a title with Wildred Owen’s, “Dulce et Decorum.” The poem seeks to capture a father and an awareness of perspective, a photo looking beautiful when we know it is also a Japanese internment camp in the Topaz desert, a polio vaccine administered to the shoulder by its inventor to test it which likewise is healing, or death. As in so many poems, the layers are suggestive, powerful, provocative, but ultimately, so tender.
Over and over I was moved by different poems. In “Venice,” Rekdal uses the reflections against a rainy window to capture the cruelties of mother passed to mother become in old age vulnerable selves that stir reflection itself through the themes replicated throughout, what we do as adult selves with the tenderness and hurt we experience from father, mother, lover. “Lake Effect” powerfully juxtaposes snow and a police killing of a neighbor. “Memento” is an Aunt Jemima, an Uncle Ben, a geisha doll, racist mementos that serve as lone allies in a white world but also accusation, paired well with the poem that follows, “Bob and Carol,” who mirror Rekdal and partner in the future, childless, mixed-race. In “The Dying Gaul,” language is rich and sensory-thick, and a child’s memory of a statue comes to life imagining frontier forces of life and death and understood now as an adult in the context of imperialism, but also desire; important themes here are taken up again in the book’s longest poem, “Whistlejacket,” about viewing or trying to view George Stubb’s eighteenth century painting of a horse, a meditation on art and the artist, beauty and artifice, and the maturing of the artist, the poet, that now sees the pain, the violence, the technique that stand on power or weakness, that may attempt beauty—"What did my desire / for beauty mean / finally, but that I believed / I could survive it, / could expand / to become more of it” (85).
Much of the book is written in the shadow of Paisley Rekdal’s father dying or dead. In the title poem, and in many of the works, Rekdal reflects on what we pass on and hope will be understood as love, when so much is twisted and uncertain in our own path to love, to create, to remember: In “Heritance,” Thomas fantasizes the money he will pass on, “who believes money is love” (105), when he passes on a tenderness often absent in his drunken ageing as now he wonders “over the hummingbirds in his garden.” The poet writes “I could weep to see / such tenderness in him” (105), because she has also inherited the small cruelties of the intellect, all “those poisons I drank / and still drink” (103, “The Choice”).
Heritance is full of desire and grief and ambition, as an observer, an artist, a viewer, a daughter, an historian and student, as an aggrieved, a pretender, a conciliator, a woman, a bridge over race and culture. Rekdal compassionates the dead and sees the child in the father, all he inherited and all he passed on.
Many poems are inflected by war and family serving in them. The most powerful of these for me is the poem sharing a title with Wildred Owen’s, “Dulce et Decorum.” The poem seeks to capture a father and an awareness of perspective, a photo looking beautiful when we know it is also a Japanese internment camp in the Topaz desert, a polio vaccine administered to the shoulder by its inventor to test it which likewise is healing, or death. As in so many poems, the layers are suggestive, powerful, provocative, but ultimately, so tender.
Over and over I was moved by different poems. In “Venice,” Rekdal uses the reflections against a rainy window to capture the cruelties of mother passed to mother become in old age vulnerable selves that stir reflection itself through the themes replicated throughout, what we do as adult selves with the tenderness and hurt we experience from father, mother, lover. “Lake Effect” powerfully juxtaposes snow and a police killing of a neighbor. “Memento” is an Aunt Jemima, an Uncle Ben, a geisha doll, racist mementos that serve as lone allies in a white world but also accusation, paired well with the poem that follows, “Bob and Carol,” who mirror Rekdal and partner in the future, childless, mixed-race. In “The Dying Gaul,” language is rich and sensory-thick, and a child’s memory of a statue comes to life imagining frontier forces of life and death and understood now as an adult in the context of imperialism, but also desire; important themes here are taken up again in the book’s longest poem, “Whistlejacket,” about viewing or trying to view George Stubb’s eighteenth century painting of a horse, a meditation on art and the artist, beauty and artifice, and the maturing of the artist, the poet, that now sees the pain, the violence, the technique that stand on power or weakness, that may attempt beauty—"What did my desire / for beauty mean / finally, but that I believed / I could survive it, / could expand / to become more of it” (85).
September 17, 2026
A Reckoning of Searing Honesty and Haunting Self-Recognition
Heritance is a fiercely intimate interrogation of shame, spectacle, racial ambiguity, and the grief of familial trauma passed generation to generation. Paisley Rekdal’s virtuosic gifts as a composer of intertwined narratives lit by lyric interludes are everywhere apparent in this stunning exploration of personal and cultural histories, inexorable entanglement, and the implicit responsibilities embedded within every encounter.
In “Lake Effect,” a longing for snow and the lack of it provide the disturbing environment where a confrontation between a policeman and a man holding a shovel escalates to deadly violence. The brilliant fusion of scientific language with vivid interior perception and the harrowing depiction of body camera footage offer multivalent perspectives on an event that shatters into the speaker’s private life when she recognizes James, the neighbor who is shot.
In “Memento,” a cast iron Aunt Jemina doll from a dead friend’s collection of racist memorabilia is a literal and metaphorical burden. Stashed in a closet, it is an object she cannot sell, not trusting the stranger who might want it, who might use it to harm or humiliate others. She confesses she is owned by the doll. Of herself and the reader, she asks, “Who else will love // the doll the way it demands / to be loved, the way I have learned to love // myself in it.”
Paisley Rekdal’s searing honesty throughout Heritance collapses the distance between speaker and reader. We are not meant to be spared from our own passions. When she describes the video of a brawl she plays over and over, we question our own racial biases and visceral sympathies, our roles as witnesses to spectacles of violence.
I am grateful for this reckoning, for the poems’ irreducible inquiries of coexisting emotions: grief, rage, desire, compassion, and haunting self-recognition. In “The Brace,” this profound imaginative capaciousness blurs the boundaries between speaker and father. She “sees” a car accident her father suffered alone. Decades later, when she finds the brace he wore to protect his back, the dark where he rested and she now stands encircles the brace and moves through it. The pain of his mind and body is her pain now, shared pain, terrible and tender, the strange blessing of pain pierced by love that never heals.
Heritance is a fiercely intimate interrogation of shame, spectacle, racial ambiguity, and the grief of familial trauma passed generation to generation. Paisley Rekdal’s virtuosic gifts as a composer of intertwined narratives lit by lyric interludes are everywhere apparent in this stunning exploration of personal and cultural histories, inexorable entanglement, and the implicit responsibilities embedded within every encounter.
In “Lake Effect,” a longing for snow and the lack of it provide the disturbing environment where a confrontation between a policeman and a man holding a shovel escalates to deadly violence. The brilliant fusion of scientific language with vivid interior perception and the harrowing depiction of body camera footage offer multivalent perspectives on an event that shatters into the speaker’s private life when she recognizes James, the neighbor who is shot.
In “Memento,” a cast iron Aunt Jemina doll from a dead friend’s collection of racist memorabilia is a literal and metaphorical burden. Stashed in a closet, it is an object she cannot sell, not trusting the stranger who might want it, who might use it to harm or humiliate others. She confesses she is owned by the doll. Of herself and the reader, she asks, “Who else will love // the doll the way it demands / to be loved, the way I have learned to love // myself in it.”
Paisley Rekdal’s searing honesty throughout Heritance collapses the distance between speaker and reader. We are not meant to be spared from our own passions. When she describes the video of a brawl she plays over and over, we question our own racial biases and visceral sympathies, our roles as witnesses to spectacles of violence.
I am grateful for this reckoning, for the poems’ irreducible inquiries of coexisting emotions: grief, rage, desire, compassion, and haunting self-recognition. In “The Brace,” this profound imaginative capaciousness blurs the boundaries between speaker and father. She “sees” a car accident her father suffered alone. Decades later, when she finds the brace he wore to protect his back, the dark where he rested and she now stands encircles the brace and moves through it. The pain of his mind and body is her pain now, shared pain, terrible and tender, the strange blessing of pain pierced by love that never heals.
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September 22, 2026It is no Animal Eye.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews