ALLODYNIA, Nisa Malli

Nisa Malli

Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-990293-06-1
$19.95 CDN / $18.95 US | Trade Paperback
April 2022

Rooted in the indescribability and disembodiment of pain, Nisa Malli’s Allodynia looks outward to space and the future of humankind, as well as inward to the body. In “Pain Log”, a suite of body-horror poems, she explores illness as a haunting or possession: “At home, my stitches / undid themselves, fevers pet me // like a dog, my eyes opened / backwards. Sleep ghosted me // more than usual.” In “Ship’s Log,” a near-future speculative suite of poems, Malli turns to themes of alienness, artificial intelligence, and the impossibility of translation; danger, intimacy, and war; as well as the worlds we choose to build together. Allodynia is a highly anticipated poetic debut that more than fulfills the promise of its author’s bpNichol award winning chapbook Remitting.

Praise for Remitting:

“Remitting delicately weaves contemporary lyric with the precise registers of medical and conversational speech. Nisa Malli’s lucidity of thought makes for the kind of surprising vision that is the hallmark of a poetry of hard-won insight and abundant music. An assured and singular voice with an ‘unwillingness/to be bent like a bird’s wing’.”—Canisia Lubrin and Souvankham Thammavongsa, bpNichol Chapbook Award juror’s citation