What Urge Will Save Us

"Fierce like the history of poetry itself, Alina Pleskova gives us poetry that explores how relations, love, and even failed love are where the real answers await. I would read anything she writes, a poet who gives the world back to us with her brilliant, assertive poems. Say Thank You Alina and BUY THIS BOOK!" --CAConrad "In Alina Pleskova's What Urge Will Save Us fever, competing economies of intimacies, work, and cultural expectation circulate together around a speaker who resists definition(s). Off-handed insight and candor brew an extremely subtle defiance here, allowing Pleskova to ask in subways, on sidewalks, of partners and friends all the gorgeous questions about how to resist and persist." --Cynthia Arrieu-King "I thought it'd be more years of / men repeating my jokes louder / instead I swallowed / something electric" and I'm not exaggerating when I say Alina's is the only poetry I read these days. What Urge Will Save Us is a potent little book, all summer thighs sticking to the bus seat and late-night existential crises tempered with tarot; the kind of thing you write "!!!" in the margins of and make your friends borrow like they could ever care the way you do. Forget mamochka with her zakuski and come drink up the sun tonight, it's all-in out here, it is, excuse me, really fucking great. You'll remember this one." -- Sonya Vatomsky "When your post-millennial love/life is feeling all Buffy S6 going through the motions minus that up-tempo musical number destined to be a breakaway pop hit- what's a girl to do? If you're Alina Pleskova, you re/write it, your own Ballad of Sexual Ennui, chronicling the struggle for intimacy & understanding among lovers & friends in a world gone weird. In her new chapbook, Pleskova writes with a weary wisdom, naked & true, sentimental minus the mawkish. Here is a suite of anthems for a sexual revolutionary charting her course out of the whimper & back to the bang. Her urge will save you if you let it." -- Jenn McCreary