The Cover of Dead Horse by Niina Pollari

Dead Horse

Niina Pollari

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

What People Are Saying

Joyelle McSweeney

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 Ito, indubitably of the present yet of a material insoluable 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."

Inside the Book

Category:
Poetry
Binding:
83 pp Perfect Bound
Dimensions
8.8" x 5.9"
Publication Date:
February 2015
ISBN:
9780991429813

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Publishers Weekly

Jordan Scott

Bookish

From the Book

Dear Suitor

	  			

When arriving in their SmartCar

To where I was sitting on my divan

Did you think I would be a human being

Did you think it was a girl I would be

A girl to sweetly

Take your dark headphones to crowd you

As you're listening to your dark music

To soothe your dark self

You are like an accordion

Full of borrowed air

Puffed up

Fake big

Where I am a dark stone with a reservoir

Containing blood that no hand will ever reach

And nobody with a daisy in his teeth

Will floss his way into me

Of that he can be sure

Repossessing the Zombie

	  			

The static washing over

A continuous whinny

I can't, obligation

I was supposed to be

The courthouse, I was supposed

To be the somnambulist

You should

Never startle walking sleepers

On the TV they are saying the heart

is actually more like a pine cone

covered in individual scales, each one

harboring a small brown seed

the way one conceals a fugitive