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Say Fire (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781962770439)
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Selma Asotic
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Books
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Description
xBosnian poet Selma Asotic's fearless debut on memory and resistance
Wounded bodies are at the heart of Say Fire. Bodies cringe and crouch (years after the war) as fireworks shoot through the sky, bodies fail from cancer in peacetime, bodies collapse into local headlines and reports. The body remembers but seems to learn nothing, Selma Asotic says, her own body mummified by shadowed histories and doubt. With precise lyrical grace, Asotic winds us past these fragments, these questions, into rooms where lovers lie "gorged on light," their bodies alive and blossoming. A hand on the small of the back might dissolve all rage - all fear - conviction that one has survived. Born in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asotic writes in a feverish present tense, tracing her family history in close lyric and careful reportage. "That's how/ every history begins./ Something bursts, and everyone clutches their chests to see/ if it is they who burst." Leaning into her own recursions, hesitations, and doubt, Asotic alchemizes language into something corporeal. With lines that conjure the chimeric turns of Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Marina Tsvetaeva, Asotic illumines a life lived in the wake of war - the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves retracting their gestures.
Author: Selma Asotic
ISBN-10: 1962770435
ISBN-13: 9781962770439
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Language: English
Published: 09/30/2025
Pages: 80
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
Wounded bodies are at the heart of Say Fire. Bodies cringe and crouch (years after the war) as fireworks shoot through the sky, bodies fail from cancer in peacetime, bodies collapse into local headlines and reports. The body remembers but seems to learn nothing, Selma Asotic says, her own body mummified by shadowed histories and doubt. With precise lyrical grace, Asotic winds us past these fragments, these questions, into rooms where lovers lie "gorged on light," their bodies alive and blossoming. A hand on the small of the back might dissolve all rage - all fear - conviction that one has survived. Born in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asotic writes in a feverish present tense, tracing her family history in close lyric and careful reportage. "That's how/ every history begins./ Something bursts, and everyone clutches their chests to see/ if it is they who burst." Leaning into her own recursions, hesitations, and doubt, Asotic alchemizes language into something corporeal. With lines that conjure the chimeric turns of Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Marina Tsvetaeva, Asotic illumines a life lived in the wake of war - the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves retracting their gestures.
Author: Selma Asotic
ISBN-10: 1962770435
ISBN-13: 9781962770439
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Language: English
Published: 09/30/2025
Pages: 80
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
By Selma Asotic
xA Sarajevo-born, bilingual writer, Selma Asotic earned dual BA degrees in English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Sarajevo, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she worked closely with Robert Pinsky. She's interested in poetry and revolution. She's taught writing to undergraduates at BU and NYU, and ESL to adult learners at community-based organizations in Sarajevo and New York. She's also worked as a translator and interpreter. Her first book of poetry was published in both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 2022 and was awarded the Stjepan Gulin Prize in 2022 and the Stefica Cvek Prize in 2023.
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