Say Fire [Paperback]

Bosnian poet Selma Asotić’s fearless debut on memory and resistance

In a pocket, Asotić finds a brood of planets. In the wind, a cathedral of voice. And in the throat, a thorn bush hums. She slakes her thirst with briny water, and later, tucks a thorn under the tongue. Ready to speak. The poet’s voice is warm with questions, recursions, and doubts. “Do you remember nothing from your life?” she asks, observing the challenge of memory and family history in the wake of the Bosnian War. The poet recalls men returning from war, with bodies no bigger than marbles in a palm. A bullet may pierce through a door and become a peephole. Through it, Asotić can see the myths of war – that shrapnel makes men celestial – or fragments of her own mayhemmed matrilineage. Her lines, blossoming and chimeric, search for a home, and a mother, in peacetime. Her language is alchemized into the corporeal, illumining the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves washing away their gestures. In Say Fire . . . grief pulses and winds. It is not a self-pitying or indulgent grief . . . Asotić's are poems that ostensibly seek to unsettle and challenge . . . [Say Fire] is a portrait of life after war, traversing distance and language, from the Bosnian in which Asotić began writing into the English which she has chosen to write in now. —Jonathan Chan, Diode Poetry Journal

The poems in Say Fire reconstruct a world of fragmented representation arising from the oblivion of snuffed-out lives, loves, and memories . . . Language’s fealty to meaning is questioned, and the poems interrogate whether or not language is serviceable enough to activate healing. The answer is suggested as the poems address the narrator’s mother: 'I need you / to lolc—