Released 30th September, 2024 // 70 pages // 978-1-916938-47-2 // RRP £12.99
Moon Flogged by Réka Nyitrai is a compelling journey through surreal landscapes and the intimate corners of the human psyche. Nyitrai's poetry weaves together fantastical imagery and everyday moments, blurring the lines between reality and imagination. Each poem offers a glimpse into a world where animals and objects carry profound meanings, and where identity, love, and memory are explored with both whimsy and intensity. Nyitrai's unique voice invites readers into a dreamlike experience that is as haunting as it is beautiful. This collection is a testament to the power of poetry to transform the mundane into the magical.
PRAISE for Moon Flogged:
Réka Nyitrai is the real deal as a poet. She has already brought new life to the haiku in her previous collections – they draw on surreal art and dreams; they take us into the betwixt and between. In Moon Flogged she gives us longer poems that take us further into her worlds of fairy tales, spells, curses, and ‘ghosts come from duck eggs’. She probes the domestic world to reveal the strange undercurrents at the heart of family relationships and erotic love. These are poems that are richly imagistic; and in which anything can become anything else (‘my hands will be reborn as birds’) - poems that are transnational, translingual. Here are echoes of Chinese and Japanese poets; and particularly of poets such as Joyce Mansour, Chika Sagawa, and Gabriel García Lorca. But her voice is unique, with its own poetic lexicon, ‘the language of slapped water’. Sparking with dark humour, her work also sings with a gorgeous lyricism that comes from deep within the Zone of true poetry.
— Liam Carson
Réka Nyitrai is a multilingual force. An international enigma. A surrealist soothsayer. A spirit who dreams in droplets of water and embers of bone. Whether writing prose poetry or haiku or (in this case) free verse, her words extend through the wanderlust of the underworld, the hypothetical and the magical, the ambient moment before waking. In the four sections of Moon Flogged, clouds talk, a pigeon becomes a hat, phantoms have ponytails, ants milk cows, and a horse sits in a living room. Husbands and wives flood the pages, a “rotunda of mothers” casually have cameos, and family members twirl around like mice. The vocabulary is simplistic and domestic yet the images are dense and complex, residing inside the absurdist beyond. Leonora Carrington and Gro Dahle chatter through these feminist poems, these hymnals, these chants. If Réka blows out birthday candles, the smoke might be full of crows. See also: wolves. See also: ghosts. Moon Flogged is a tender book of family and loss and grief and love. It is a menagerie of animals packed with feathers and stuffed with eggs. As small as a needle and as tall as a cake.
— Benjamin Niespodziany
In Moon Flogged, Réka Nyitrai mesmerizes with a poetic prowess that transforms the mundane into the mystical and the familiar into the otherworldly. With a voice both fierce and delicate, surreal and absurd, Nyitrai navigates themes of identity, memory, and sexuality, creating a compelling exploration of the self and the world that is both deeply personal and universally resonant. Reminiscent of Mary Ruefle, Aase Berg, and Kim Hyesoon, her poems are a testament to the power of words to capture the ephemeral and eternal. Here, we have a speaker who is “more beautiful than the peak of a mountain / seen from a crashing plane.” And through her collection, Nyitrai spectacularly proves her statement: “Poetry is the mother of all cakes.”
— Karan Kapoor
ABOUT Réka Nyitrai:
Réka Nyitrai is a Romanian-Hungarian poet who discovered her poetic voice at forty-one, mainly through Japanese short forms, but particularly haiku. Her debut haiku collection While Dreaming Your Dreams won the Haiku Society of America Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for 2020. Following this, she began to write both prose and lineated poems. She writes in English, her third language. She is a spell, a sparrow, a lioness's tongue — a bird nest in a pool of dusk.