"Pleskova's poetics is deliciously generous, even in its moments of ambivalence;
reading
Toska is like chatting with your best friend about pursuing & evading
pleasure while the American project unravels. These poems don't just see to the
heart of queer & immigrant subjectivities; they enact them."
-Raena Shirali, author of summonings and GILT
"Toska is a book of the immigrant daughter in her not-quite-own world,
and a book of contempt for striving and capitalism . . . Pleskova, generous
and funny and modern, is a poet of forthright intimacy."
–Niina Pollari, author of Path of Totality
"Reading Toska was a spiritual and whole-body experience. I laughed, I screamed,
I teared up, I nearly bought a one-way ticket back to Moldova, I called my
mom. No one captures the poetics of eros and diasporic longing amid our late-stage capitalist hellscape like Alina Pleskova. 'Assuring various robots / that I'm
not a robot several times daily' does not prevent our speaker from 'stockpil[ing]
intimacies almost too ephemeral to clock.' And what a gift this book of intimacies
is. Toska is a tender and wry instruction manual for navigating desire and the void.
I will follow Alina Pleskova anywhere."
–Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy
