Niina Pollari

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. This 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. Many 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. A 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.

Poems

Path of Totality

In her recent chapbook Fabulous Essential, Niina Pollari uses everyday objects as a point of entry to significant questions about femininity, romance, and relationships. Written as a series of stunning, image-rich lyric poems, Pollari's meditations on domestic life offer subtle critiques of gender hierarchy while at the same time challenging the predominantly male artistic tradition that her generation has inherited. As the speakers of these poems struggle to negotiate received ideas about female identity with modern life, Pollari simultaneously invokes and questions a range of literary conventions, thus offering readers a skillful matching of form and content. --Kristina Marie Darling.

Fabulous Essential

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

Dead Horse

Ben Fama

Ron Riekki

Josh Gardner

Elizabeth Mikesch

Moonshot No. 3: Secret will be devoting a section to a special theme. James Merrill wrote entire poetry collections based on his seances with the spirit Ephraim. Sylvia Plath references her Taroc (Tarot) pack in the infamous "Daddy," and when she asks the Ouija board about fame in Hughes' Birthdays Letters, it responds with "You will have paid for it with your happiness, / Your husband and your life..." The creative arts have always had a relationship with the mysteries of the world, inspired by those things just outside the range of our senses. For our fall issue, we want to hear secrets, to take a glimpse into the unknowable: childhood's language of fairy tales and fables, the secret movement of the stars, incantations, spirits, the mysteries surrounding death. We seek the uncanny, the hidden, the immeasurable.

Niina Pollari

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