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| photo: Jack Sorokin | |
Niina Pollari's newest poetry collection is Path of Totality (Soft Skull, February 8, 2022), which explores the sudden loss of her child. She's also the author of another poetry collection, Dead Horse, and an occasional Finnish translator. She lives with her family in western North Carolina.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
I'll offer a paraphrased quote instead: this is a book for anyone who ever expected anything.
On your nightstand now:
White Magic by Elissa Washuta--easily my favorite thing I read in 2021. Washuta is doing something totally new in the personal essay category; even what she executes with epigraphs is stunning, and I've kept this book in my stack since I read it. I also just finished Fight Night by Miriam Toews. For the last couple of years, I've ended the year on Toews. Last year it was Women Talking, and before that, All My Puny Sorrows. She is hilarious and devastating, and I will read whatever she writes. And the third book in my current rotation is The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang, which is told through dreams. Sunflowers are an important symbol for me, and I had wanted to write something about them but then discovered this perfect book existed. I hate reading about dreams, but found this so compelling and painful and deep.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I loved Astrid Lindgren's books from a very young age. She is best known in the U.S. as the author of Pippi Longstocking, but she wrote lots of books for children, and many of them deal with death and illness and rejection and all kinds of big, real topics while still being magical and full of joy. They're populated by outcasts, orphans and children in trouble, which is all I wanted to read about when I was a kid. My very favorite was The Brothers Lionheart, in which both of the brothers die in the first 10 pages.
Your top five authors:
I can't name a top five anything, as it's always changing and growing, but here are a few authors whose work I will always read, no matter the format or genre: Kate Zambreno, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ariana Reines, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Miriam Toews.
Book you've faked reading:
The first time I was asked to read The Great Gatsby, I didn't do it. I just found the experience of reading it unpleasant. Unfortunately this did not go well for me on the exam. I've since read it several times, and even tried to like it, but sadly do not.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I have a few I recommend over and over to people. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson if you've got a tender heart but think you don't like or read poetry. Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines if you want a quick and dirty lesson on poetic voice. The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal by Tytti Heikkinen if you want to see how the Internet can explode into poems. (I'm the translator of this last book, so I am biased.)
Book you've bought for the cover:
White Noise by Don DeLillo. I was a teenager and needed a novel for a road trip so I chose one at random from Barnes & Noble. In retrospect I'm glad it turned out to be a postmodern classic.
Book you hid from your parents:
I didn't hide my reading from my parents. My mother was encouraging about my reading habits, and got me a library card very early. Occasionally in my teenage years, she raised an eyebrow about certain books after reading the back copy--I remember this happening with Anne Rice novels--but she never stopped me from reading anything. Maybe sometimes she didn't know what I was reading, which was to my benefit. I've got a little daughter now, and I've been thinking a lot about supporting her this way without getting in her way, in the way of her interests.
Book that changed your life:
Satan Says by Sharon Olds was a big reading experience. Reading Plath had already primed me for the power of the feminine subjective, but reading this book (a first book!) opened a window into transgression for me in my late teens. Oh, you can just invoke the devil and use him to say disgusting things? I really hadn't read anything like it before. I even loved the experience of buying the book, which had a stark red cover with the title written in old English font.
Favorite line from a book:
For the past few years I've kept a document with favorite lines from all my reading each year. Some recent favorites:
"to hate yourself AND let yourself live/ to hate AND let live/ that is the goal" --from Outgoing Vessel by Ursula Andkjær Olsen
And:
"If someone stops loving you/ It's because you didn't/ Care about their life" --from Lovability by Emily Kendal Frey
Books you'll never part with:
My collection of chapbooks and zines, and my first edition of The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann is the first to come to mind. At the time when I read this novel, it was so immersive, sprawling, fatalistic and romantic that I was completely in its world. It reminded me of the summer I spent listening to Lana Del Rey. I wish I could have that experience again but we change as readers--for instance, I don't live by the concept of the annihilating romance anymore, so I'm sure the love interest wouldn't be as compelling to me. But sometimes books come to you at the right time, and they reflect something true about you back to you, and those are the magical experiences that reading makes possible. It's seeing yourself in a mirror for a moment while you're walking, a glint of light and maybe you catch your own eye. But then you keep walking and never return.