by Allisa Cherry
February 2, 2026
night myths: before the body by Abi Polokoff; Red Hen Press; 118 pages; $18.95.
Abi Pollokoff’s debut poetry collection night myths • • before the body, released this year from Red Hen Press with much advanced praise, is so deft in execution, so consistent in gait and vision from start to finish, I find it hard to believe it’s a debut at all. Perhaps this level of skill suggests an abundance of preparation. Pollokoff did, after all, arrive at this book with impressive accomplishments, including time spent as a Jack Straw writer, a Hugo fellow, and residencies with institutions like The Seventh Wave, the Seattle Review of Books, and the Alice Gallery. Maybe it can be chalked up to Pollokoff’s status as a triple-threat in the writing world—not only is she an accomplished poet, but she’s also an editor and a book artist. Add in a wildly inventive mind and the result is a structurally elegant first collection that feels both beautifully rendered and critical to this moment. Through her exploration of the female body and the stories and myths we create around it, Pollokoff illuminates the perils women negotiate every day. With night myths, readers explore the tension women walk between who they are and who they are expected to be, the struggle between liberty and constraint, and the ceaseless negotiation of one's true identity versus the identity society foists upon us.
It really should come as no surprise that Pollokoff is a book artist when one considers the symmetry, the exacting consideration, of the composition of her first full collection. night myths • • before the body swings around the singular poem "lilies & these eroded," which is both a deep-seeing of lilies decomposing in a vase and a contemplation of the way language about the decomposing lilies is at work, restructuring, maybe even replacing, the actual thing: "lilies at shoredge// weigh the phrase against its/ foliage: so much vastness/ in the gasping roots so much in/ the gasping tide." This poem-as-pivot, which serves as a sort of volta in the collection, is brilliantly anticipated in the preceding poem "& today a hull to hold onto" where the poet writes "...let the body silk/ its way into hinge & delay/ hinge & hinge into some/ thick threads of lilies." The hinge divides the book into two wings, each beginning with a poem composed of found text ("a long vulnerability of paper and consciousness" is comprised of language extracted from the art show /what are we but lying single surface/, which ran during her residency at the Alice gallery in Seattle. “from granite illusion, so the conjoined world follows” is a cento.) and each closing with what she herself describes as "anti-poems." There are other sister-poems in both wings that allow the reader to track the speaker's evolution. The best example of this are the poems "to forest is to hide a woman," couched in the first section, in which the speaker appears to be grappling with the received parameters of being a woman, using language that quivers, lisps, and ends in night, and its bright twin "to heather is to stake a claim," a poem full of daylight, springtime, and freedom found later in the book. There's a counterbalance created in this mirroring, but throughout the text, the speaker and the reader, is also haunted by another poem, italicized and running along the bottom margin of intermittent pages like a subcurrent of compulsive thoughts a female body might have about what it is supposed to be doing with itself:
cross your legs uncross your legs cross your legs uncross your legs cross your
legs uncross your legs sit still & say hello
the stiller the louder
the stiller the louder The female body—including the fracturing of female identities because of the pressures and expectations placed upon the female body—is a primary concern of night myths • • before the body. “This is the body being soaked/ up. This is the body being/ soaped in. this is the body being/ pulled down, pushing out its/ skin & pruning. falling/ skincalved into granite and/ dismay” Pollokoff writes in “billow & pulse.” In night myths, Pollokoff has created a poetic field, replete with white space that serves as silence, where the female body is exploded out and grafted onto nature in an environment that feels denuded of the masculine eye or “I,” creating a speaker/self so tied up to the ecology that it collapses and demands reinvention. Again, in “billow and pulse”: “burrow in the toes and take root:/ minute after minute after/ month. don't leave the windwatch, don't leave the furl, fingers in flicker and display, in parity and pearl the little nailbeds…” Throughout the text, Pollokoff uses the bodythroat, palm, tongue, ankles knees, to describe the ecosystems the speaker moves through and uses the natural world to illuminate the perils of the body as in “wildflower mythology” where she writes:
the lady the wildflowers
their frail cacophonies
emptying
their throats
their soundless stems
until finally, body and nature become indistinguishable in a way that signals a sort of liberation of the body. We see this in full-effect in the final poem “and tonight this is what it’s like:” “...is this what it’s like to be ribboned into honest/ flickerings to be full of these/ lilies full of these small things/ years & dates & you & tonight/ i’m so happy.”
Pollokoff understands that this consideration and reinvention of identity necessitates a transformative language and this is one of the marvels of night myths • • before the body. Her syntax fragments, doubles back on itself, creates compound words that feel simultaneously primordial and entirely new: "breezehumbled," "tendonbridged," "bonesap," "skinhungering." The effect is generative, as if one is reading language as it emerges in real time. Periods punctuate mid-thought, creating caesuras that force the reader to breathe differently, to slow down to experience language stoppered in the gullet or adhering to an unfamiliar logic. The poet Jane Wong pointed out that these poems demonstrate "wildly inventive language and sonic curiosity.” The lyricism shimmers and shifts like light on moving water, polyvocal and percussive. But Pollokoff’s use of recurring motifs—flowers, light, language trapped in the throat, the body, trees, the sea—become refrains that accumulate meaning through repetition, each iteration revealing new insight. The language of the collection teaches the reader how to read it.
night myths • • before the body is an astonishing meditation on the intricacies of female identity. Structurally elegant and lyrically compelling, the collection's careful architecture reveals a poet with a clear understanding of the relationship between form and meaning. Pollokoff’s writing favors embodied perception over a straightforward narrative arc, calling for a receptive, yielding manner of attention from its readers. This attention is repaid with a somatic intimacy and an unflinching inquiry into the nature of how female identities might fracture and be made whole.
While some readers might find the density of Pollokoff’s language or the fragmentation of form challenging, these are the very qualities that lend her work its power. night myths • • before the body is the work of a poet who is, by all appearances, committed to expanding the possibilities of language, one willing to bend syntax and reshape matter in service of capturing the complexities of being a body in this world.
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“into the haunting lull of birches”: Transfiguration in night myths • • before the body by Abi Polokoff
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Freestocks from UnSplash
Allisa Cherry grew up in a rural community in an irradiated desert in the southwest of the United States. She has since relocated to the Pacific Northwest where she teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the US and recently received her MFA from Pacific University. Her poetry has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and can be found in High Desert Journal, West Trade Review, The Maine Review and Rust + Moth. Work is forthcoming at The Columbia Review.
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© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
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© 2026 Iron Oak Editions
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