night myths • • before the body

Named One of the Five Best Underread PNW Authors of 2025 by Katie Lee Ellison for The Stranger

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“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

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“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 Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

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“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 Transcendental Factory

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“This collection promises to stay with its readers […] finding new ways to live out the embodied music her generation asks of feminist environmental poetics.”

—C. R. Grimmer, author of The Lyme Letters