Split / Game of Little Deaths

Réka Nyitrai's newest book, Split / Game of Little Deaths, is a cyclical and symmetrical surrealist offering. A two-for-one collection, one side is a hybrid and experimental work blending Nyitrai’s real diary entries with imagined diaries of surrealist artists Unica Zürn (1916-1970), Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), and Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Both Zürn and Woodman died tragically due to mental illness, one in Paris and one in New York City, while Bellmer, the partner of Zürn, died five years later and was buried next to her. The result of Split is a chorus of voices, coming and going from psychiatric hospitals, channeling life and death, sickness and recovery, in a whirlwind of timelines and perspectives.

The other, Game of Little Deaths, is a dizzying yet accommodating dream world mixing free verse and prose poetry. A mystifying landscape where anything can happen. While Split is more diaristic in its approach, Game of Little Deaths comes from a place of deep imagination and creative escape. “My poems afford an opportunity to disrupt the everyday with the unusual,” writes Réka.

The layout for this double book invites readers to finish one book, flip it upside down, and begin the other.

“A dance of resemblances and dissemblances. A mess of mimicry.”

Johannes Göransson, author of Summer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2022)

"Réka Nyitrai’s poems radiate with strange wonder. They hold their breath in Dada’s river and float like dream engines of the chaotic, simultaneously haunted and hilarious."

Noah Falck, author of Exclusions (Tupelo Press, 2020)