Niina Pollari

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 & 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

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