R©ka Nyitrai is the real deal as a poet. In Moon Flogged she gives us 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 Garca 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
R©ka 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 R©ka blows out birthday candles, the smoke might be full of crows. See also: wolves. See also: ghosts.
- Benjamin Niespodziany
In Moon Flogged, R©ka 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
