Paisley Rekdal is assistant professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, and two books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos and Six Girls Without Pants. She is the recipient of the Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Nerve, Ploughshares, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner, and on NPR, among other places.

About The Invention of the Kaleidoscope:

"Paisley Rekdal's gaze never wavers whether she is looking at a bowl of cherries, her Chinese grandmother's mastectomy scars, an injured dog, or a Vincent Price B-movie, and in the kaleidoscope of her images she creates a new reality-fragmented, musical, and utterly true."
—Barbara Hamby

"In her dazzling long poem 'The Invention of the Kaleidoscope,' Paisley Rekdal observes: 'I suppose / it is an accident anything is beautiful.' Whether accident or skill is responsible, the beauty of this collection is humane, touching, and yet also full of glitter and evanescence-like the haunted life of the radiant speaker we follow throughout the poems."
—Bin Ramke

"Sir David Brewster's invention of the kaleidoscope in 1830 provides the historical frame for one of Paisley Rekdal's brilliant new long poems, while a family narrative-elegized and eroticized by turns-provides the personal site, in 'Night Scenes,' for her second. One is lit up and adazzle, one muted by shades of memory and erasure. The Invention of the Kaleidoscope finds its greatest power in such mitigating oppositions."
—David Baker