The event is free and open to the public. 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.The 2022 River Reading will welcome Paisley Rekdal, poet laureate of Utah, who will read from her work April 27. Nightingale updates many of Ovid’s subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. 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. 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. 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. Then the dark came down again between us. If something in me ever lived, it lived in him, fishing the cold trout-thick streams, waking to snow, dying when he died, which is a comfort. Even now, I thumb that face like a coin I cannot spend. The treasure of him, like anything, gone. Sun would turn him commonplace: a knot of flies, a rib cage of shredded tendon, wasp-nest fragile. A shield of light dropped before the eyes, pinned inside that magnificent skull only time would release. And if I keep these scraps of it, what did it keep of me? A flight, a thunder. Nothing beside that dense muscle, faint gold guard hairs stirring the dark. More than my regret for the child I did not have, which I thought once would pierce me utterly. More than the image of my friend, cancer-struck, curled by her toilet. More than the broad back of a man I loved. And how often that sight returns to me, shames me to know how much more this fragment matters. How quickly the gray body fled, swerving to avoid my light. The car filling with it: moonlight, piñon: a cat’s acrid smell of terror. And how did I know what to call it? Lynx, the only possible reply though I’d never seen one. Quick swim up through my headlights: gold eye a startle in black: green, swift glance raking mine.
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