Toska

by Alina Pleskova

Toska derives its title from the Russian word which denotes a melancholic longing without a singular cause, longing for a better world than the late-stage capitalist hell we live in. Toska explores a sense of rootlessness and a sort of anti-nationalism; how the pervasive sense of being an immigrant or "in but not of" a place never quite dissipates, particularly amid the dissonance and alienation felt within U.S. culture gunning towards a vision of imperialist capitalist white supremacist hegemony. Still, within this bleak reality, there's an insistence on documenting and noticing the multivalence of desire ― its delights and pitfalls alike. These poems come to the weary conclusion, time and time again, that sexual liberalism/liberation and hedonism are only one sort of revelation ― that this sort of openness and exploration isn't enough to save anyone from despair or the existentially weary feeling of toska from which the title takes its name. But desire is not just Eros ― the poems carry a strong desire for a different world, for everyone.

Genres: Poetry, Politics, Queer, LGBT

120 pages, Paperback

Published June 13, 2023

About the author

Alina Pleskova is a Lambda Literary Award nominated poet, editor, and Moscow-born immigrant turned proud Philadelphian. Her poetry collection, Toska, was published by Deep Vellum in June 2023 and nominated for a 2024 Lambda Literary Award. She is a 2020 and 2022 Leeway Foundation grant awardee. Her chapbook, What Urge Will Save Us, was published in 2017, and her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Thrush, Peach Mag, swamp pink, the tiny, and elsewhere.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Wonder is coming back for us, but not yet’

This book is so hard hitting I might need to put some ice on my entire essence to recover. Alina Pleskova pummels you with her prose across the course of Toska, perfectly capturing the cocktail of spiraling modern anxieties and dread that we drink to numb ourselves from. With a wry and witty gallows humor that comes with watching what might be the collapse of a neoliberal hellscape all around us, Pleskova examines themes of immigrant identity, queerness and desire in a world where everything is converted into consumerism. Toska is a book that will have you nervously laughing along to hide the sads creeping in as each poem so strikingly shakes us up and makes us feel. The poems twist and dance to a rhythm of modern living, shuffling from topics where at any time ‘some remarkable disruption could arrive in the middle of things’ in their circuitous route of examining truths that manages to avoid feeling overly sporadic. Grim yet gorgeous, I devoured Toska only to realize that it had devoured me.

‘All around me, women grip the buoys of their autonomy
to stay afloat until personhood washes up on the shores of no nation.’

I began reading this in the waiting room of a toddler’s gymnastics class, which somehow feels an ideal setting to have this collection slap you around and push all your buttons on the discomforts of modern living. Pleskova comes out hard with Take Care (read it here), ushering us into a voyage of crushing capitalism, constant anxieties, delivery robots, ‘microdosing Adderall’, in a world where ‘everyone seems too woke or weary for a ruinous type of intimacy’ and ‘luckiest among us score mental health days— / what might, in an alternate timeline / be the ability to simply exist.’ It’s practically a thesis statement of a poem for what the collection will bring, particularly the hard-hitting moments on being from one land in a new land and stuck somewhere between them. The subjects in poems shift just as much as she explores the way identities shift and one person is many things, like Walt Whitman telling us ‘I contain multitudes.’ She perfectly captures the way everything can feel exhausting and overwhelming and how we are all just trying to get by the best we can, or, as she puts it, ‘We’ve each got our own way of keeping / the lights on.’

‘In adapting to regional customs, / one becomes a citizen of border & bootstrap mythologies,’

Permeating these poems is a poetic investigation of national identities and retaining her Russian heritage while living in the US. ‘The country where I live— / its surveillance of us surveilled by the country I’m from,’ she writes, along with discussions of watching old Soviet animations for ‘secondhand nostalgia,’ feeling pride when ‘when someone compliments my undiluted pronunciation,’ references to Marina Tsvetaeva and an infusion of Slavic folklore. ‘Our people prefer their tea & humor darker,’ she writes in Our People Don’t Believe in Tears , accounting for the style of humor that livens up this collection and binds it to her heritage as well. Though she sums it all up most effectively in the title poem, Toska, where she writes:

Cautionary tales about crones
& hungry wolves & wicked hearts

lost, like so much else, in the gap
between the old world & this

amerikanka, launching immigrant
daughter guilt into the receiver

while my mother gains traction
in the hatched narrative that she'll die

before her firstborn's settled.


Pleskova also acknowledges how she must ‘regard my debts to our legion,’ looking not only at Russian heritage but also the long history of those for who being queer meant having to hide but fighting so that one day future generations would not have to. ‘To be legible / is a release’ she writes, and I love the beauty of that statement of being able to present openly and finding the freedom in it. This feels especially pertinent reading it during Pride Month in a country where, despite all the incredible gains where queerness is legal and open, there have been many pushbacks and legislation trying to erase all the work and make our identities illegible again. That the quickest way for a book to face a banning is to be a queer or Black author is quite telling.

I’m no longer terrified of vastness
My love
Let’s abscond
Find some galaxy
some town
some meadow
in which to become
stranger & stranger
-from Elusive Black Hole Pair

Perhaps my favorite moments of the collection are her discussions on love and desire, always delivered with sardonic wit:

Desire doesn’t aspire to anything other than itself—
I don’t miss so-&-so, just being seen in that way. Just having
an unholy place to rest, set all this down.
-from Re:Eros

Yet also we have ‘devotion like the best cure / you can hope to suffer’ and it all seems to bend towards an excavation of the truth that our modern living is so overly stuffed with erasing any part of us that isn’t either being a worker or consumer for the benefit of the rich that the space for processing love and desire is too fragile. Or comes with a price tag. ‘Nothing is free in America— // that’s every first gen’s starting inheritance—but most anything / can become commerce.’ We are all stuck doing the ‘Mental math on what I can afford to enjoy.’ Yet while everything is depicted as rather bleak, there is still the celebration of us all dealing with it as best as we can:

Here’s to the rest of us, fixated on cosmic dealings
ancient beyond human intervention.
Give us our daily digest of microplastics
& plots to place ads in our dreams.
Anonymous donors sponsored today’s witnessing
of Art & I treated myself to a bath bomb
while reading about the demise of the Choco Taco
& why “no one” “wants” “to work” “anymore”
-from Sacred Bath Bomb

If the statement ‘Do you know / anybody who is okay right now / with the question mark deliberately left out’ is something you have pondered in recent years, then Toska is for you. It is a deeply probing work wrapped up in gritty humor and the flashy trappings of modern day such as the language of online discourse and anxiety. I even learned a few things, like scientists termed the average color of the universe ‘cosmic latte.’ For all the sardonicism it is also very beautiful and moving, and will totally kick your ass. You’ll love it.

5/5

What’s that French phrase
meaning ‘sweet note’
& did millennials kill it
along with Applebee’s,
napkins, homeownership,
fabric softener, savings,
& putrid, distinctly
American idealism—
I mean, finally.
-from Composure

[hope h. · Rating 5 out of 5]

huge shoutout to s.penkevich for recommending this collection to me - i THOROUGHLY enjoyed it! i haven't read a new poetry collection that i've enjoyed this much in a while. alina pleskova's poetry is sharp and concise, alternating biting humor with heartwrenching vulnerability. the experience of reading it was akin to one of those hurricane shots - rum, cold water to the face, and a slap, then repeat.

one thing that really impressed me here was the use of near-constant modern references in a way that felt fresh and relevant, without ever tripping over the line into cheesy. normally these kinds of references dissuade me from a poem, but pleskova uses them in a way that feels cohesive, comprehensive, and most importantly of all - intentionally. she's not saying things just to say them here, there is an intent to each poem and every word drives it further towards that intent. an excellent read that i would heartily recommend!

supplication

i want it this way:
pheromones tripping or otherwise fixed.

see: the teeth incision tattoos
a love three springs removed & i commissioned
as a reminder of the deranged state
we stayed in only long enough
to commemorate, & just as well.

or else: wall-gazing while shadows move
across an apartment with slick floors for spinning,
a fire escape with its marquee of leaves,
& a bed always unmade as if to say
the days never break quite so cleanly.

some remarkable disruption could arrive
in the middle of things, or even now
carried along the breath-

[also: daylight saving, now that i am in reykjavik & can think, saturn return, this day is a wash, blood moon, and spit.]

[El · Rating 5 out of 5]

I expected to love it. I loved it more than I expected to, which I thought impossible. Equal parts earthbound and cosmic, brutal and idyllic, sanguine and stunning.

[Zoe Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m always grateful to find people who haven’t given up wanting more. I want more and when I claim I don’t, part of me is surely sleepwalking. That kind of poetry!

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent from beginning to end. Unique to its speaker while still being super relateable--and where I don't relate, you might, it seems. Memorable big ideas and turns of phrase and out and out beauty. Buy and read this fantastic book of poetry!

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Toska is a book about dislocation. Being in one place—physical, emotional, sexual—while longing for another.

Desire doesn't aspire
to anything other than itself--

I don't miss so-&-so,
just being seen in that way,

just having an unholy place
to rest, set all this down

I love its casual ferocity. It’s like an exotic animal that lulls you into complacency and then sinks its fangs into you: Surprise, I was born for this!

[Josh Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

One can easily be a fly on the wall with these accessible poems. Contemporary and intellectual, Pleskova welds tongue to cheek with a flower vase torch. The Notes are appreciated too. A rare treat of poetry.

[Kayla - the.bookish.mama · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are so many strong lines in these pages. I find many poets start or end on a really solid line, but she mixes them into various parts of the poem, these scattered moments where you just can’t help but think “damn” out of adoration for her talent.

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was so incredibly special to me. I ate it up in one tiny sitting and now I’m just sitting here mulling over it all. distinctly queer energy ♥️ my absolute favorite poem was Now That I’m in Reykjavik and Can Think. just so gorgeous.

[Harrison Wein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toska is a Russian word which, as Alina Pleskova writes in the title poem of this collection, has no equivalent in English. I don't speak Russian, but read that it's an unhappiness, a deep sadness or melancholy. It’s sort of akin to the Portuguese word "saudade," a term for bittersweet nostalgia, something that might have been, which is somewhat well-known in English poetry. Toska is indeed a sad, melancholy collection. Pleskova, as a queer woman and Russian immigrant living in Philadelphia during these tumultuous times in America, is an outsider in many ways, and her searching lack of belonging pervades these poems.

I bought this collection after hearing Pleskova read the brilliant "Our People Don’t Believe in Tears." That turned out to be my favorite of the collection. I thought "Take Care" and "Sacred Bath Bomb" were also standouts. I find poems to be more effective on paper, but you can read these through the previous links and, if you enjoy them, give the collection a try. The notes at the back, which explain the cultural references, are helpful in order to fully appreciate the poems.

I enjoyed this collection overall, but did find the consistent tone of despair grueling. I would recommend reading it alongside other things and maybe not taking it all in at once.

[chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love to recount how the first McDonald's workers in Moscow were trained to smile. What do I get to claim, or blame when convenient? How I flicker off so easily. What some call aloof. My penchant for benign scams & bargain scouring.

I'm from a place, I'm fond of saying, where statues of poets are ubiquitous. Where I got this love of such long walks.

On a Russian podcast, they say sneekerhede & eenflooenser. There's my sheepish indignation. There's the language a language becomes.
-- "Place"

Awe is rare & sometimes grotesque

& it's not that I don't know
what I want;

I just don't know how to
want the same things

for a long time
-- "Toska"

I'm tuned
into the cicadas,
wanting to join
but what part of the body
makes a sound so primordial
-- "Composure"

I'm no longer terrified of vastness

My love

Let's abscond

Find some galaxy

some town

some meadow

in which to become

stranger & stranger
-- "Elusive Black Hole Pair"

Mourn the redwoods, fireflies, platypuses, permafrost, all else that deserves to outlive us & won't
-- "Daylight Saving"

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alina Pleskova’s inventive and non-recreated Toska is a simultaneously incoming and upcoming work versed in a voice thrice unreal. In the reading, I felt so distant from my own handwriting that I decided to not take notes. My worry began to worry, sure. But also, the hereness of my joy departed sweetly from two places at once. Pleskova’s writing is deeply spelled. Whether it’s the strange shortcuts that longing gathers to delay its arrival, or the stilled intimacy that leaves loneliness in a vehicle designed for reentry, Pleskova seems a first visitor of a remembered life and makes short agony of the current moment without timestamping our human, our outdated, anguish. Toska has better words for its words.

[Olga Zilberbourg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book, written at a high pitch and able to maintain its level of intensity throughout, without overwhelming the reader but rather co-opting her as a friend and fellow traveler. An immigrant writer stringing together a living without a financial cushion or protections creates her own communities of affinities and passion, bonded by shared loves in liminal spaces. I read this in the middle of the night, when I couldn't sleep, and my own altered mental state seemed to match that of the speaker's. I loved the bits of Russian in this book -- the language adds layers of meaning to the work of immigrant poet.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Sending love from this smoky cove
flush with episodic arguments in favor of constant motion,

each gorgeous detail the only of its kind
& the mind's dazed shutter relentless to capture

this sublimity, this proof we should be tender,
given our undoing drifts in just the same.
As muscle memory is made stubborn,
so it can reprogram: like the trick where

I pinch longing mid-shudder, save it for another
time. Get the shower good & scalding,

head out divine & untethered
into the endless day."

DIVINE AND UNTETHERED HOTTIES REJOICE

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We let the strangeness / course through us, take the long way out."

Alina Pleskova provides us with a banger of a debut poetry collection. It's sharp and nonchalant, metropolitan and punk rock, empathetic while ashing a cigarette onto a cop's bald head. Kissing a beautiful stranger while giving the middle finger to ICE. Created within the depths of a crumbling capitalist society, this collection is spiritual, curious, folkloric, and forever exploratory, floating between gutter and traffic jam and glam.

[Gabriel Noel · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC given by Edelweiss+ for Honest Review

A read that stays with you. Rich and vivid metaphor reigns throughout. Pleskova doesn't shy away from the intimate nor the macabre. Evoking a sense of wanderlust in a over nationalist nation, she speaks freely about her experiences as a Russian immigrant.

My favorite poems are: "Take Care", "Blood Moon", "Composure", and "Sacred Bath Bomb."

[aswa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It's somewhere toward the end of the Anthropocene & still I want / to fall in love the the Wong Kar-wai way, though I have the heart of a slacker / & everyone seems too woke or weary for a ruinous type of intimacy."

Two words: Free. Original.

[Archangel Belletti · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up

[R Schip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meaty, engaging poetry from a Russian immigrant. Loved the turns of phrase. Themes in nature, relationships, and identity. Worth a read if you love poems or want to love them.