Belonging: Hieu Minh Nguyen & Paisley Rekdal
Buy PBF passPoets Hieu Minh Nguyen (Staying Still) and Paisley Rekdal (Heritance) come together with author Jae Nichelle (Grownfolk Blues) to discuss their new poetry collections. Both works delicately reflect on violence, race, grief, and what is passed down between generations.
About Staying Still:
The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how: How do our anxieties around the idea of belonging estrange us from the very world we seek to belong in? How impossible does it feel to stay still and face ourselves? From the intimate longing of queer boyhood to the collective expectations imposed upon children of refugees, these poems face head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.
About 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.”
