In writing “How to Read This Poem,” Niina Pollari’s choice was honesty. Cuteness, rhetoric, and devices had no place in a project about conveying the truth of personal tragedy, she explains in Episode 10 of Multi-Verse. She cut those parts out.
How can we live with a past so painful we don’t want to remember it? “How to Read This Poem” takes the reader through the deep water and rip tides of grief; it offers truth rather than answers.
“How to Read This Poem” can be found in Pollari’s collection “Path of Totality” (Soft Skull, 2022), available here: softskull.com/books/path-of-totality/
Multi-Verse is a poetry podcast hosted and produced by Evangeline Riddiford Graham, senior managing editor at Public Seminar. To hear more poets share the poems they don’t usually read aloud, visit Multi-Verse at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, SoundCloud, or multiversepoetry.org. For monthly poetry updates direct to your inbox, subscribe to the monthly Multi-Verse newsletter.
![A lantern slideshows four overlapping illustrations of the Earth depicting its tilt at different time periods in the past, present and future. Dates represented are 13000 BC, 5544 BC, 1921 AD, 2296AD. Handwritten in blue ink at bottom left corner of plate is the text 'G53 CLW [illegible] Aug '22'.](https://i0.wp.com/publicseminar.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Wragge_Earth.jpg?fit=768%2C749&ssl=1)
