night myths • • before the body

What are the stories we tell our bodies about our bodies? What are the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves? night myths • • before the body illuminates the dichotomies contemporary women grapple with every day: identity and expectation, self-preservation and doubt, freedom and entrapment, wildness and cultivation. By dissolving the boundaries between the body and the natural world, Abi Pollokoff’s evocative debut deconstructs the essence of womanhood, carrying the reader into a communing at once vulnerable and insistent. night myths • • before the body is a resounding interrogation of being human in a posthuman world.

ADVANCED PRAISE

Abi Pollokoff’s night myths • • before the body is a stunning debut, navigating womanhood, mythology, the body, and the surreal knowledge that dwells within. These poems linger with sensorial intimacy, stretching “spandex language,” with wildly inventive language and sonic curiosity: “the skin all breezehumbled with ghosts & kin.” Pollokoff’s writing is a generous awakening, with poems encased in oozing amber, revealing multitudes of selfhood to be discovered: “i woke up this morning with seagulls encased inside me.”
—Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (longlisted for the the 2022 Pen/Voelcker Award in Poetry), and Overpour

In Abi Pollokoff’s debut collection, night myths • • before the body, we experience a storm of language. But what a carefully calibrated storm it is: one where lineation and the cadence of semantically driven breath create an atmospheric meaning that holds the reader with the same trembling electricity as pre-lightning static. On the page we not only see but also feel and hear the new topography rendered by this weather—like the echo of water’s shape stamped on the land after a storm—and receive a text that is freshly embodied, fully realized, and, as Pollokoff writes, “all verbed out.” In this propulsive work, the tension between sound and syntax sings like rain on dry earth. As Pollokoff writes, “watch the body.” I can’t take my eyes away.
—Keetje Kuipers, author of All Its Charms, The Keys to the Jail, and Beautiful in the Mouth

As Abi Pollokoff’s percussive rhythms morph and flow, the mind and body are drawn ever deeper into a grove of night music. In this mythic space the recurring motifs of fragmentation, metamorphosis, and liminality articulate a feminist critique of fixed identities. Offered in their stead are between-spaces and an invitation to transform like the book’s narrator from human to plant, from solid to liquid. This powerful debut volume sings the body and the communities it makes possible with the human and nonhuman alike. Let us listen. Let us participate in this riveting communion.
—Karla Kelsey, author of On Certainty