2025, July 26
Tiger Toast, Reading by Nika Pfeifer

Between post-apocalyptic mind games, moonlit escapes into language, and tongue-twisters that feel like dancing when read aloud, Pfeifer’s poems awaken a desire for what poetry can still do today: shake us up, dissolve boundaries, and take flight. Courage! And perhaps not exactly hope, but confidence! And at their center stands a figure that appears both concrete and mythical: the Tasmanian tiger. The long-extinct animal—half reality, half legend—becomes in Pfeifer’s work a cipher for a world that always points beyond what exists: toward what has been lost and what is still possible.

“We drink vodka to life, to love, kiss each other—like tigers. And wondered, how do aliens kiss?”

Pfeifer’s tiger is not only an animal, but also an idea: the notion that within every disappearance lies a trace of departure and renewal.

“A toast to the tiger is also a toast to that which disappears, but perhaps continues to live elsewhere (right now, within us) in another form.”