Nightingale

Author: Paisley Rekdal

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (2019)

Nightingale is a book about transformation. By radically rewriting myths central to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Paisley Rekdal contemporizes Ovid’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. A series of connected poems trace the continuing effects of sexual violence and rape on survivors, where nightmares mix with images of empathy, and hope emerges from the dark forest of memory. Rekdal’s characters change and change again, not by divine intervention but through human events: illness, injury, love, creation. Is transformation punishment or reward? How does language name, and fail to name, that which permanently changes us? Nightingale boldly sings of our mutable world, where we each wake into something terrifyingly new.