Gesturing at… everything. Like Stevie Nicks singing “Wicked Game” or “Chelsea Hotel #2” to the Decadent Friends of Poetry. Alina’s GGG, but for the incessant precarity and lingering ennui, feeling her way through early 20th century cafes with early 21st century lighting. Third eye-black, tight leather jacket, half-wolf, half-glittering, spits out, tits out, kicking her boot-heels heaven-ward. The word “untethered” on her lips. She shares anecdotes about daily dings, failed tenderings, grotesque debt, insatiable doubt. Mosh pits and situationships. Brute experiential truths. She satellites from the trapeze like a cosmic bath bomb lobbed into a tub-full of crabs. Subject to objectification, or worse, spiritually-draining jobs. Alina on an abject train. Alina in the Russian rain. Alina in a tattered rom-com. Alina in a pom pom hat. Here’s a toast, to “Toska,” to revving the narrative engine, to going on your nerve, to abundant, ruinous, love. Toska by Alina Pleskova (Deep Vellum, 2023).
