Sundress Reads: Review of night myths • • before the body

Abi Pollokoff’s night myths • • before the body (Red Hen Press, 2025) is a tour de force of inventive language. She constructs an incredibly original poetic landscape via fragmentation, punctuation, dichotomy, and white space—one saturated with feminist critique and riveting social commentary. Pollokoff’s writing is extraordinary and surreal, carrying readers into an intimate meditation around the multiplicities of womanhood.

Like rainfall, the atmosphere of night myths • • before the body is simultaneously staccato and seamless. While reading, I was immediately struck by the innovative creation of compound words that endlessly dot these pages. Within one of the first poems, “wildflower mythology,” words like “stemwrapped,” “soilsoaked,” “goldthreaded,” and “shadowplucked” surprised and delighted me. Although none of these are in the dictionary officially, they felt so deeply accurate, visually-clear, and aesthetically coherent that I would easily vouch for their inclusion. Pollokoff here puts forward her own mythological voice with these words; she establishes her artistic voice and epistemological vision early in the collection to articulate her own becoming. Borrowing from the compound word “wildflower” itself, Pollokoff brilliantly sees patterns already existent in language and generously extends them to other natural phenomena.

Pollokoff’s structure, ordering, and paginal layout are also designed with curiosity, attentiveness, and care. With the eye of an architect and the mind of an artist in communion with her world, she places the sequence “lilies & these eroded” in the center of the book. Pollokoff writes:

weigh the phrase against
its foliage: so much
vastness in the gasping
roots so much in the
gasping tides
•
here & over that way here
& over that way & here &
here & here &.

Her gorgeous language describing lilies on a shoreline brings together earthy diction like foliage and roots and water imagery. The open vowels in “gasping tides” connect to the vastness of nature. The repeated phrases in the second stanza excerpted above mirror immemorial natural cycles. In the notes section, Pollokoff notes her intention to match “the nadir of the speaker’s emotional self-consideration” with “the vertex of the book’s ‘v.’” The foresight to be
mindful of the physical artifact of her book with the speaker’s interiority is nothing short of remarkable. Pollokoff beautifully gives her speaker a chance to refract, reflect, and grow across the second half.

I resonate strongly with “particular reminders when prayers for the body aren’t enough” for its reflection on womanhood, and more generally, living with a body that changes. Pollokoff’s poignant questioning include vivid images to capture philosophical reflection; for example, “it’s not a question of streets or piano keys / it’s not a question to fill veins with tendrils of curved bark” and “is the body swallowed in fabric to hide / or to hold it.” Anyone who has selected particular articles of clothing based on feeling insecure or ashamed of their body will recognize this speaker’s experience. The title also evokes the social norm to express ‘thoughts and prayers’ instead of offer action to help someone in need. Pollokoff’s poem is a reminder full of smaller reminders for those who wish they were a different shape or who are struggling with changes in their body; she conjures fruits, wrists, cityscapes, and muscles to help readers towards self-acceptance by sitting with their beauty.

The poem “to forest is to hide a woman” also touches on the experience of holding self-doubt and self-love. Pollokoff writes:

Such wants—to be known, to be understood—are universal. Pollokoff’s fragmented syntax makes a stop and go effect, mirroring the thought process of someone holding uncertainty and desire inside them simultaneously. The periods force me to read more slowly, and through that adjustment, I’m able to recognize more multiplicity of meaning from these words. For example, there would be less room for curiosity in the opening of the second stanza excerpted above if it simply read: “i want to know how my insides are. i want to catch the dripping light of stained glass hanging from rafters…” Because of Pollokoff’s deconstructed and then reconstructed sentence structure, phrases like “my insides are i” echo more clearly, loudly. Moments of defamiliarization with phrases like “light of stained” also piqued my curiosity, making me want to read again and again.

Pollokoff’s commitment to sustaining such an inventive, clever, and transformational poetic across the entirety of night myths • • before the body makes this thoughtfully crafted collection a standout in contemporary poetry, and one I will return to many times. Her unique diction and deep care for humanness will reach those looking for both a cerebral and emotional reading experience.

night myths • • before the body is available from Red Hen Press

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Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is Cofounder and Managing Editor at Two Cardinals Literary. At Sundress Publications, she serves as Assistant Chapbook Editor. Livia has been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA in poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.