88 Pages
©2015
Publisher: Birds
Purchase includes: PDF

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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."

Niina Pollari lives in Brooklyn and has written two previous chapbooks: Fabulous Essential (Birds of Lace, 2009), and Book Four (Hyacinth Girl 2012). She translated Tytti Heikkinen's THE WARMTH OF THE TAXIDERMIED ANIMAL (Action Books, 2013) from the Finnish.