Bio
Author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986; to be reissued by Red Hen Press) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Manhattan Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Main Street Rag, Miramar, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Poetry Quarterly Review, Magma (UK), Neon (UK), Orbis (UK), Armarolla, December, and elsewhere. Online, his poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), Misfit, OffCourse and elsewhere.
Trigger Warning
I thought at first it was a play,
and wondered who would enjoy
such stasis and pretension.
Those hieratic robes and tone,
an actor who could carry neither off
and took a thousand words to say
Escape is both impossible and a sin.
Absurd, I thought, from a mere warden.
Prisons are waste and pain, not sacred.
Yet to that audience, which filled all space
including what I’d thought was mine …
Their worship turned to cheering when,
repeatedly, he invoked freedom,
a thing that died when it became a word.