TOSKA
poems
Alina Pleskova
Deep Vellum Publishing 2023
Alina Pleskova’s inventive and non-recreated Toska is a simultaneously incoming and upcoming work versed in a voice thrice unreal. In the reading, I felt so distant from my own handwriting that I decided to not take notes. My worry began to worry, sure. But also, the hereness of my joy departed sweetly from two places at once. Pleskova’s writing is deeply spelled. Whether it’s the strange shortcuts that longing gathers to delay its arrival, or the stilled intimacy that leaves loneliness in a vehicle designed for reentry, Pleskova seems a first visitor of a remembered life and makes short agony of the current moment without timestamping our human, our outdated, anguish. Toska has better words for its words.
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reflection by Barton Smock
kingsoftrain 
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