Alina Pleskova : part one

Alina Pleskova is a poet who lives in Philly by way of Moscow. Her first chapbook, What Urge Will Save Us, was published by Spooky Girlfriend Press in 2017. Poems have appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, American Poetry Review, Peach Mag, Queen Mob's Teahouse, & more. She's on twitter at @nahhhlina.

What are you working on?

I was working on a sort of ethnography of desire. I sent a short survey to a couple dozen people-- internet strangers, friends, former lovers, current lovers, etc.-- & asked them (among other things) what they desired, how & when & if desire ends. I've been thinking about desire's mutability, duality, voraciousness, what it looks like in the current cultural climate & in late capitalism & in a body/mind in the aftermath of traumas, how it fractures, how it can become hierarchical, etc. I wanted to write into that & include many other voices, a sort of riff on A Lover's Discourse, as part of a suite of poems I've been working on about fraught intimacies. But it's sort of on hold while I get my bearings. Desire in any form, even a messy one, is a difficult head space to access in light of the news recently. One thing I noticed, in the survey results I've gotten so far, is how often people want to leave their bodies entirely.