The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee
The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee

Author: Paisley Rekdal

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0307429083

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When you come from a mixed race background as Paisley Rekdal does — her mother is Chinese American and her father is Norwegian– thorny issues of identity politics, and interracial desire are never far from the surface. Here in this hypnotic blend of personal essay and travelogue, Rekdal journeys throughout Asia to explore her place in a world where one’s “appearance is the deciding factor of one’s ethnicity.” In her soul-searching voyage, she teaches English in South Korea where her native colleagues call her a “hermaphrodite,” and is dismissed by her host family in Japan as an American despite her assertion of being half-Chinese. A visit to Taipei with her mother, who doesn’t know the dialect, leads to the bitter realization that they are only tourists, which makes her further question her identity. Written with remarkable insight and clarity, Rekdal a poet whose fierce lyricism is apparent on every page, demonstrates that the shifting frames of identity can be as tricky as they are exhilarating.

Animal Eye
Animal Eye

Author: Paisley Rekdal

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2012-02-26

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 0822978385

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Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly, Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states "It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves."

Striking Distance
Striking Distance

Author: Charles Russo

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2016-07

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0803290519

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In the spring of 1959, eighteen-year-old Bruce Lee returned to San Francisco, the city of his birth. Although the martial arts were widely unknown in America, Bruce encountered a robust fight culture in the Bay Area, populated with talented and trailblazing practitioners such as Lau Bun, Chinatown’s aging kung fu patriarch; Wally Jay, the innovative Hawaiian jujitsu master; and James Lee, the Oakland street fighter. Regarded by some as a brash loudmouth and by others as a dynamic visionary, Bruce spent his first few years back in America advocating for a modern approach to the martial arts, and showing little regard for the damaged egos left in his wake. The year of 1964 would be an eventful one for Bruce, in which he would broadcast his dissenting worldview before the first great international martial arts gathering, and then defend it by facing down Wong Jack Man—Chinatown’s young kung fu ace—in a legendary behind-closed-doors showdown. These events were a catalyst to the dawn of martial arts in America and a prelude to an icon. Based on over one hundred original interviews, Striking Distance chronicles Bruce Lee’s formative days amid the heated martial arts proving ground that thrived on San Francisco Bay in the early 1960s.

The Girl in the White Van
The Girl in the White Van

Author: April Henry

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company (BYR)

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1250157609

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A teen is snatched outside her kung fu class and must figure out how to escape—and rescue another kidnapped victim—in The Girl in the White Van, a chilling YA mystery by New York Times bestselling author April Henry. When Savannah disappears soon after arguing with her mom’s boyfriend, everyone assumes she's run away. The truth is much worse. She’s been kidnapped by a man in a white van who locks her in an old trailer home, far from prying eyes. And worse yet, Savannah’s not alone: ten months earlier, Jenny met the same fate and nearly died trying to escape. Now as the two girls wonder if he will hold them captive forever or kill them, they must join forces to break out—even if it means they die trying. Christy Ottaviano Books

The Broken Country
The Broken Country

Author: Paisley Rekdal

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 0820351172

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The Broken County explores the cultural and psychological effects of Vietnam on both Southeast Asian refugees and returning U.S. veterans. Rekdal examines the complicated ways in which we struggle to comprehend and memorialize the war.

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope
The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

Author: Paisley Rekdal

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2007-02-25

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 0822990830

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The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed elegy,” all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation.

Appropriate: A Provocation
Appropriate: A Provocation

Author: Paisley Rekdal

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-02-16

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1324003596

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A timely, nuanced work that dissects the thorny debate around cultural appropriation and the literary imagination. How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In Appropriate, creative writing professor Paisley Rekdal addresses a young writer to delineate how the idea of cultural appropriation has evolved—and perhaps calcified—in our political climate. What follows is a penetrating exploration of fluctuating literary power and authorial privilege, about whiteness and what we really mean by the term empathy, that examines writers from William Styron to Peter Ho Davies to Jeanine Cummins. Lucid, reflective, and astute, Appropriate presents a generous new framework for one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature.

Inside Out & Back Again
Inside Out & Back Again

Author: Thanhha Lai

Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0702251178

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Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

Intimate
Intimate

Author: Paisley Rekdal

Publisher: Tupelo Press Lineage

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781932195965

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Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Asian American Studies. Native American Studies. INTIMATE is a hybrid memoir and "photo album" that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, INTIMATE creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal's Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis's murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.

Nightingale
Nightingale

Author: Paisley Rekdal

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Published: 2019-06-18

Total Pages: 91

ISBN-13: 1619322013

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Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. In Nightingale, a mother undergoes cancer treatments at the same time her daughter transitions into a son; a woman comes to painful terms with her new sexual life after becoming quadriplegic; a photographer wonders whether her art is to blame for her son’s sudden illness; and a widow falls in love with her dead husband’s dog. At the same time, however, the book includes more intimate lyrics that explore personal transformation, culminating in a series of connected poems that trace the continuing effects of sexual violence and rape on survivors. Nightingale updates many of Ovid’s subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.