The second release of Piżama Press!

Poems by Réka Nyitrai

86 pages

Publication date: May 27, 2026

Cover art by Gaia Alari

About the Author

Réka Nyitrai is a spell, a sparrow, a lioness's tongue — a bird nest in a pool of dusk. A Romanian-Hungarian poet, she learned English (her primary language of writing) later in life, moving fluently between prose poems, haiku, and free verse, often channeling the feminist surrealist currents of Leonora Carrington, Aase Berg, and Aglaja Veteranyi. In 2020, she released a bilingual (Spanish and English) collection of haiku known as While Dreaming Your Dreams (Mano Ya Mano Books) which received a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. She then released her debut full-length poetry collection, Moon Flogged, in 2024 through Broken Sleep Books, and recently released a chapbook through Ethel Zine called With a Swan's Nest on Her Back. 

About the Book

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.

Advance Praise

“In these poems about ghosts, photographs, dolls and mothers, Reka Nyitrai enters into the volatility of mimesis. A dance of resemblances and dissemblances. A mess of mimicry. Nyitrai channels Bellmer and Blake and Woodman and Zürn and herself: We am writing to you to warn you. The warning is the promise of art - as drug, as reproduction, as burning lake, as memorial. A dream only makes sense in a dream, childhood only makes sense as surrealism, deaths are games, the poem is split into many. The plagiarist is faithful to the counterfeit. When an unfaithful lover calls the poet by the wrong name, they are both transformed. An old acquaintance is the strangest stranger, for in their eyes, one might again wear a child’s face.”

- Johannes Göransson, author of Summer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2022), translator of Aase’s Death (Black Ocean, 2025)

"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. Recommended for those who already know that the “smell of burnt snow / wakes the stars."

- Noah Falck, author of Exclusions (Tupelo Press, 2020) and Prerecorded Weather with Matthew McBride (SurVision Press, 2022)

“Shake the Réka Nyitrai snowglobe and watch the dolls of Hans Bellmer, marmalade lakes, hawk-headed dogs, flamingos and supernovas float and mingle. The moon is at large in these diary entries, dream songs and folk tales, which make up this stunning double-poetry feature from Piżama Press. These dispatches from the subconscious and the psychiatric ward come equipped with the snappy, light touch of Simic and an unsettling pinch of Lynch. Nyitrai shows us how melancholy can be magicked into a surreal super power and how “once written down, every word remains a ghost.”

- Vik Shirley, author of Some Deer (Broken Sleep, 2024)

“‘The clay butterflies / perched on mother’s eyelids / want me to breastfeed them’ is one of the many daringly original images in Split / Game of Little Deaths, Réka Nyitrai’s surreal and sensual new poetry collection, in which artists become mythic, the mythic becomes familiar, the familiar becomes strange again, and strangeness becomes your dear friend.”

- Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You (House of Anansi, 2022)

Excerpt

a prose poem from the book, originally appearing in Only Poems

Contamination

I remember the spring when I coughed up tulips. At first it was strange, even disturbing. People looked at me in amazement. Then, with time, it became something humdrum. Actually, I even managed to sell those tulips. Every Thursday a wholesaler would come and buy them in bulk. Later, I found out that when the tulips were placed in vases they immediately morphed into crows.