A Crash of Rhinos

'Forget safety. Tell me more about accident,' says Paisley Rekdal, and that might well be her ars poetica. The poems in A Crash of Rhinos are smart, funny, and sexy—beat that for a trifecta. But Rekdal is not after mere sensation. She pursues the seeming randomness of life for the knowledge it has to offer: 'That night in question—its arson, its accident— / it was the first moment / I knew how to love you.'

In A Crash of Rhinos reason and the uncensored disclosures of excited speech coexist with astonishing intensity. The American language seems suddenly, single-handedly revitalized. The poems are passionate, sexual, demonic. They are ceaselessly inventive. They are beautiful.

* former Poet Laureate of the United States *

What a fabulous and fabular debut . . . The spacious narrative plane of the book is crisscrossed with myriad purposes. Here the tropes of physical science, the tactics of exploration narratives, the rich lineage of literary forebears—and all the risky pleasures of invention—are not just artifacts attached to the poems; rather, they are vitally informing partners to every lyric excursion. Rekdal's large voice is as capable of interrogation as of thunderstruck awe, and her spacious poetic site contains—it requires—chaos as well as shapeliness, irony as well as affection, velocity as well as entropy. If these poems prove that we 'help erode the things we want / to illuminate,' they also resist that proof with every fiber of language.