I’m rereading Paradise, Victoria Redel’s most recent collection of poems. Beginning with some midrashic poems, retellings of the story of the Garden of Eden, the book moves on to poems about family, childhood, adolescence, parenting, desire, aging, memory, menstruation, and more. Poems that, at a glance, don’t appear to have anything to do with paradise and the loss of paradise. Yet, on a fourth and fifth reading, I see how deeply connected some of the common experiences of, say, aging,...
