Poetry. Women's Studies. Populated by the quotidian events and things that punctuate our days (air travel, medical exams, bathrooms, phones, etc.), the poems in Niina Pollari's DEAD HORSE are anything but common. Hyperaware, the speaker in these poems "watch[es] you watch me." She is mercurial, monstrous—"a vampire in a grayly coughing dawn," a lover who wants to put her "thigh meat next to yours," to sit with swan's blood inside her mouth and smile—but also tender in her grotesqueness: "I'm nothing / But a massive garbage mountain / Wiggling abundantly / And all I want to know is / Do you love me? / Now that I can dance." And then there it is, that word—love. That is the force that ultimately animates the poems, their vulnerability &amp; bravery: "If you say you love me / I will open my mouth and you can live in it." "These poems are so rhythmic you can almost ride them. Moving through the daily deaths of the earth, the questions of what to hold together and what to let, Niina Pollari writes from a place where emotion meets bone, exploring what it means to be a blood container. You will see your own skull."—Melissa Broder "Niina Pollari's poems unfold with a phrasal clarity I didn't know I needed, and which disturbs me: 'like an animal / enjoying the warm sunshine with blood in my mouth.' Her poems deploy the vatic informality of Tytti Heikkinen or Hiromi Itō, indubitably of the present yet of a material insoluble to the present, a voice that issues from a Grecian urn or can of Coors. This is resolved, odd, clear-complicated stuff, lovely 'like a fakey arcade.'"—Joyelle McSweeney

Dead Horse

Literature & Fiction

Pollari, Niina

Poetry

Birds, LLC

Exploring the sudden loss of her child, the hope that precedes this crisis, and the suffering that follows, this collection of poetry renders a shattering experience with candor and immediacy.\nThis collection is about the eviscerating loss of a child, the hope that precedes this crisis, and the suffering that follows. Spare, plain, sometimes startling in their snatches of humor, Pollari’s poems careen into the “tilted reality” of grief. This is poetry dredged from shock and rage, then dissected with pointillistic precision.\nMany of the pieces are closer to prose: in plain, forceful, language that will capture readers outside the poetry audience, they uncover and name sentiments outside of what is expected in books about child loss and grief: for instance, the embarrassment Niina felt for letting herself feel hope and joy, for revealing that she desired to be a mother at all, and for having to inform the world that her desire would not be granted.\nA shattering experience rendered with candor and immediacy, Path of Totality is a book “for anyone who ever expected anything” about a rarely told experience of motherhood.

Path of Totality: Poems

Genre Fiction

Soft Skull

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Books by Pollari, Niina