Paradise

“‘But doesn’t every story begin with expulsion?’ asks Victoria Redel in her lyrical revision of paradise from the distance of / in time. ‘We came from somewhere. Had a village, & then didn’t,’ she continues as pages turn in this powerful book of diaspora and exile. If Auden was right and Ireland ‘hurt’ Yeats into poetry, then certainly history ‘hurts’ Victoria Redel into most moving sonnets, list poems, invocations and spells of inter-generational memory. The reader will learn here of a grandfather who ‘played flute in the orchestra of Turkish Sultan’ and ‘was nicknamed The Little Sultan by the Turkish Sultan himself.’ Such scraps of memory, are they real, or are we making them up as consolation, watching our loved ones, one after another, disappear in time, Victoria Redel asks. What is most real to me is this poet’s insistence on astonishment despite all the history—or maybe because of it: ‘All those years of worry when I might have chosen wonder,’ she writes. Yes. Open this book on the poem called ‘Pleasure’ and you will be captivated, you will want to share these pages with your friends. I know I did. I wish you Paradise, readers. For that’s where this beautiful book is taking you, as it re-envisions the meaning of the word.”
—Ilya Kaminsky

“Redel leaps into the great mythical original maw of us—our shame, our guilt, our our our. The beginning of us, the end of us, the middle, which is still us. Paradise is a spiritual history of catastrophe and survival, described and reimagined by a traveler / witness / scribe who is one of us earthbound dreamers, an overtaker and escapee like us, whose ‘new world’ is already taken, already lived through. A glorious paradox of this work about migration, diaspora, goodbyes, regeneration, tremors and shifts, losses upon losses: the book acknowledges the bleak facts and trauma of empire, yet is simultaneously a rapturous read, a beautiful experience. . . . This book, breathing, is planted at the other end of Eden, and it gives me hope.”
—Brenda Shaughnessy