alina pleskova

My first full-length poetry collection, Toska is out now from Deep Vellum! The gorgeous cover art is by Katy Horan.

You can find it at the following places:

Deep Vellum

Bookshop.org

City Lights

Open Books

Barnes & Noble

Target

Amazon

your favorite local bookstore, if you ask!

If you’d like an inscribed copy, please get in touch with me here.

These are poems about the untranslatable but essential concepts that form us, and Alina Pleskova is the interpreter of their simultaneous hold and flight: “What you call me in the dark / isn’t what I am / & that helps me float / above the moment.” Toska is a book of the immigrant daughter in her not-quite-own world, and a book of contempt for striving and capitalism—but the centripetal force that powers these poems is the nameless part of the self, “ruthlessly / down for whatever,” the locked room that nobody can open even while you long for a breach. Pleskova, generous and funny and modern, is a poet of forthright intimacy. —NIINA POLLARI, author of Path of Totality

Alina Pleskova’s debut collection is into grabbing things by the neck, & not always gently: eros in the ancient bedroom & the age of apps; transcendence & complacency & spirituality under capitalism. Pleskova’s poetics is deliciously generous, even in its moments of ambivalence; reading Toska is like chatting with your best friend about pursuing & evading pleasure while the American project unravels. These poems don’t just see to the heart of queer & immigrant subjectivities; they enact them. I sank with this book, was buoyed by this book—how it, like so many of us in America, experiences perpetual attempt, failed translation, the feeling that we are always missing something just beyond our reach. If only we could tighten our grip, want wanting itself, we might unearth language for identity & desire language, of course, being ephemeral, timeless, fleeting, & stunning, all at once. —RAENA SHIRALI, author of summonings and GILT

Alina Pleskova's Toska bears the burden of the eponymous longing melancholy of living even as it phases into the burn of real threats to human-and humane-existence. Writing from "The country where I live- / its surveillance of us surveilled by the country I'm from-" she counterpoints the impersonal gaze of the state and algorithms that follow our movements with the poet's infinitely careful attention to the flow of the everyday: "Made it this far / without mentioning the rain. // Here it is; it's perfect." Solace is found in community, the imperative to "Daydream what mutual care could do," the vast motions astrology tracks, ancient poet gossip. Overwhelmingly, too, in the mysteries of queer desire and its dream of transcendence, the desire to desire unbounded by intolerance, or worse-murder. These poems telegraph in a seductive whisper that keeping each other alive is enough-it's everything, because "I want the class wars to start, but everyone's so tired." The poet asks, "What song was playing when my heart's chambers I got thrown open to let these breezes in?" This book is the song, its frequencies coming through the voices of friends, lovers, family, the poets of the past, and Pleskova's tender plaint that would "Mourn the redwoods, fireflies, platypuses, permafrost, all else that deserves to outlive us & won't ..." In her hands, poetry is the hack for our earthly hangover, toska / saudade its secret sauce in whose ingredients hide the seeds of a new world. We'll be together there,' "covered in each other's hair." —ANA BOZICEVIC, author of New Life

Two more weeks until Toska!

Preorder here. (Or yr book retailer of choice.)

Here are some very nice things that writers I admire have said about it:

These are poems about the untranslatable but essential concepts that form us, and Alina Pleskova is the interpreter of their simultaneous hold and flight: “What you call me in the dark / isn’t what I am / & that helps me float / above the moment.” Toska is a book of the immigrant daughter in her not-quite-own world, and a book of contempt for striving and capitalism—but the centripetal force that powers these poems is the nameless part of the self, “ruthlessly / down for whatever,” the locked room that nobody can open even while you long for a breach. Pleskova, generous and funny and modern, is a poet of forthright intimacy. —NIINA POLLARI, author of Path of Totality

Alina Pleskova’s debut collection is into grabbing things by the neck, & not always gently: eros in the ancient bedroom & the age of apps; transcendence & complacency & spirituality under capitalism. Pleskova’s poetics is deliciously generous, even in its moments of ambivalence; reading Toska is like chatting with your best friend about pursuing & evading pleasure while the American project unravels. These poems don’t just see to the heart of queer & immigrant subjectivities; they enact them. I sank with this book, was buoyed by this book—how it, like so many of us in America, experiences perpetual attempt, failed translation, the feeling that we are always missing something just beyond our reach. If only we could tighten our grip, want wanting itself, we might unearth language for identity & desire language, of course, being ephemeral, timeless, fleeting, & stunning, all at once. —RAENA SHIRALI, author of summonings and GILT

Alina Pleskova's Toska bears the burden of the eponymous longing melancholy of living even as it phases into the burn of real threats to human-and humane-existence. Writing from "The country where I live- / its surveillance of us surveilled by the country I'm from-" she counterpoints the impersonal gaze of the state and algorithms that follow our movements with the poet's infinitely careful attention to the flow of the everyday: "Made it this far / without mentioning the rain. // Here it is; it's perfect." Solace is found in community, the imperative to "Daydream what mutual care could do," the vast motions astrology tracks, ancient poet gossip. Overwhelmingly, too, in the mysteries of queer desire and its dream of transcendence, the desire to desire unbounded by intolerance, or worse-murder. These poems telegraph in a seductive whisper that keeping each other alive is enough-it's everything, because "I want the class wars to start, but everyone's so tired." The poet asks, "What song was playing when my heart's chambers I got thrown open to let these breezes in?" This book is the song, its frequencies coming through the voices of friends, lovers, family, the poets of the past, and Pleskova's tender plaint that would "Mourn the redwoods, fireflies, platypuses, permafrost, all else that deserves to outlive us & won't ..." In her hands, poetry is the hack for our earthly hangover, toska / saudade its secret sauce in whose ingredients hide the seeds of a new world. We'll be together there,' "covered in each other's hair." —ANA BOZICEVIC, author of New Life