SHADOW narratives

ON THE day we are trying to carve out time for a conversation, Paisley Rekdal is juggling her teaching schedule at the University of Utah with a morning speech at a philosophy conference on social pain and memory and a late-afternoon meeting to chair a graduate student’s oral exams on ekphrastic poetry. This is in addition to the swirl of workshops, lectures, readings, and other projects related to her 2017 appointment as poet laureate of Utah, including assembling a digital map of the literary population of her home state. “It’s getting to an almost comical level of busyness,” she says, then adds, “It’s totally self-imposed.”

Which isn’t entirely true, but such are the demands of a writer whose range and reach of activities extends to poetry, memoir, essays, and long-form journalism. Rekdal has published five books of award-winning poetry since her first collection, A Crash of Rhinos, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2000. Subsequent volumes include Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2013 Rilke Award, and Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press), a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Individual poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry anthologies of 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2019. This year’s selection, “Four Marys,” appears in her new book, Nightingale, forthcoming in May from Copper Canyon Press. Rekdal has also published three nonfiction books and along the way received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and both the Wyoming and Utah State Arts Councils. As a Fulbright Scholar she taught for a year in Chonju in South Korea, and she has lived in Paris and Hanoi through the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship.

Paisley Rekdal works on the move.

Born and raised in Seattle, she received her undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and studied in Dublin for a year. She contemplated a graduate degree in medieval studies, which appealed to her because, she says, understanding a medieval text involves seeing it through the prism of multiple sources—law, ecclesiastical manuscripts, art history, music. But when she found herself turning these sources into poems