Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Joy of Missing Out
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.anabozicevic.com/
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ana-bozicevic * https://www.anabozicevic.com/person/ * https://tarpaulinsky.com/ana-bozicevic/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1977, in Zagreb, Croatia; immigrated to United States, 1997.
EDUCATION:Attended Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), and Graduate Center, CUNY.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator, translator, and singer. Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU), New York, NY, instructor. Has also worked for City University of New York and PEN American Center.
AWARDS:Lambda Award, for Rise in the Fall; 40 under 40: The Future of Feminism Award, Feminist Press; grant, PEN American Center/New York State Council on the Arts.
WRITINGS
Also coeditor of a Serbian anthology called The Day Lady Gaga Died: An Anthology of Newer New York Poets.
SIDELIGHTS
Ana Bozicevic is a writer, educator, translator, and singer based in New York City. She immigrated to the United States from her native Croatia in 1997 and attended Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Bozicevic is a teacher at the free art school Bruce High Quality Foundation University, commonly called BHQFU, and has also worked at the City University of New York and PEN American Center.
Stars of the Night Commute
Stars of the Night Commute is Bozicevic’s first collection of poetry. The narrator of the poems in the volume observes the landscapes, fellow travelers, and objects on the train. One section of the book references Penn Station in New York City.
Writing on the HTML Giant website, Kim Parko commented: “The power of the book is that it captures you on the train, seating you by a window through which a stream of images lulls you to a drowsing that projects on your mind’s eye the strange acuity of a dream. Sometimes the train travels in the sky itself and you find a bit of peace in the expanse, but you can’t escape the haunted route, the ghosts of another’s memories arranging themselves into complex compositions somewhere nearby.” “Stars of the Night Commute is a tremendous first book by a poet who has been publishing for some time now,” remarked Jeroen Nieuwland on the Rumpus website. Nieuwland added: “One distinctive feature of Bozicevic’s work is that her poems work well together, that is, not only telling stories individually, but also in the form of several series. This in turn means that the book as a whole is a very open yet coherent collection.” Nicole Mauro, a reviewer on the Jacket website, observed: “Bozicevic is anything but inert. She is a traveler and translator of event, history, outcome and motivation. Stars of the Night Commute is a comi-tragic triumph, a necessary document that transcends the flux and drive of ordinary language, that deranges the asters called ‘pattern’ into a chaos of awesome and terrifying matter.”
Rise in the Fall
In Rise in the Fall, another collection of poems by Bozicevic, the narrator comments on her desires, both sexual and material. She also criticizes her own writing, muses on God, and obsesses about her own death.
A critic in Publishers Weekly described Rise in the Fall as “a collection that is all the more stunning for its willingness to place its author between the crosshairs of her poems.” Writing on the Muzzle magazine website, Lindsay King-Miller suggested: “The narrative voice’s refusal to be legibly ‘sexy’ or ‘desirable,’ to present a coherent narrative of sexuality, is the source of much of the work’s strength. All the strands are connected through the permanent state of upheaval, the constant shifting of connections and disconnections, that Bozicevic channels so deftly.” King-Miller added: “This is poetry with visible seams, messy and unapologetic.” Emily Brandt, a reviewer on the Sink website, commented: “In her latest collection of poems, Bozicevic embraces and confronts this alienating, patriarchal, racist, violent America, as well as the inadequacy of words. The result is poems that ring out through and beyond the lyric. Rise in the Fall is a call to action, to movement, to personal, political, and artistic revolution.” Brandt added: “Bozicevic’s second book … is composed of incredibly organic free verse that treads into form, tercets for instance, only when the content begs for it. There is no squeezing into too tight shoes in this collection.” Brandt also stated: “Here is a poet so adept at teetering that she pulls the writer’s scaffolds away to reveal the process of poem-making, which is not always so tidy. The speaker herself seems frequently still, in the center of a disordered world, maybe even stuck satisfied in a burning car, but really she is constantly moving. When you think you know her next move, she proves you right, for a moment, and then dreadfully wrong.” Patrick James Dunagan, a critic on the Rumpus website, remarked: “Ana Bozicevic writes poetry that believes in poetry. This is no small feat. And I believe her poems. They are entirely credible documents of their own accord. Nothing is laid on too heavy; there’s just enough gutsiness without any nonsense or sentimental bravado. This, too, is no small feat. Writing outwards from deep inside the poem talking about being deep inside the poem, Bozicevic offers nothing less than the ultimate tour of the inner orders of the world of the poem.” Dunagan continued: “The impressive part is that the world outside the world of the poem is always the center of concern. Bozicevic is a ‘poet’s poet’ in … that she’s intimately addressing poets and poetry in her poems, but the range and scope of her engagement far exceeds that or any other label.”
Joy of Missing Out
In 2017, Bozicevic released Joy of Missing Out. In this poetry collection, there are political and revolutionary ideas and commentary on immigrants. The speaker also pays homage to Ralkina Jones, a black woman who died while being detained by police. In an interview with Michael Valinsky for the Lambda Literary website, Bozicevic compared Joy of Missing Out to her previous collections and stated: “This book is rawer than anything I wrote in the past, I’m still too close to it. The writing of the poems was a ritual of baring and paring down charged experiences and extreme states of mind through whatever formal means were available to me, to make them legible. For myself, to live, and to communicate what was happening with me in the clearest language I know, which happens to be poetry.”
A Publishers Weekly reviewer described Joy of Missing Out as “another plaudit-worthy collection that is even more humorous, complex, and responsive to the world.” Writing on the Sink website, Brian Clifton commented: “Bozicevic’s book is full of contradiction and paradox, and in these moments the speaker is simultaneously most enthralled with their world and overwhelmed by it. The thanks the speaker of ‘Blessing’ gives echoes throughout Joy of Missing Out. Their constant obsession with death draws them further away from engaging with the world that has been built in the book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, June 24, 2013, review of Rise in the Fall, p. 154; November 4, 2013, review of Rise in the Fall, p. 24; April 17, 2017, review of Joy of Missing Out, p. 40.
ONLINE
Ana Bozicevic Website, https://www.anabozicevic.com/ (January 9, 2018).
HTML Giant, http://htmlgiant.com/ (October 12, 2010), Kim Parko, review of Stars of the Night Commute.
Jacket, http://jacketmagazine.com/ (January 1, 2010), Nicole Mauro, review of Stars of the Night Commute.
Lambda Literary Website, https://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (February 21, 2017), Michael Valinsky, author interview.
Muzzle, http://www.muzzlemagazine.com/ (December 24, 2017), Lindsay King-Miller, review of Rise in the Fall.
Poetry Foundation Website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (February 23, 2017), Harriet Staff, review of Joy of Missing Out; (January 9, 2018), author profile.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (April 12, 2010), Jerome Nieuwland, review of Stars of the Night Commute; (May 18, 2013), Patrick James Dunagan, review of Rise in the Fall.
Sink, http://sinkreview.org/ (December 24, 2017), Emily Brandt, review of Rise in the Fall; Brian Clifton, review of Joy of Missing Out.
Ana Božičević
Born in Croatia in 1977, Ana is a poet, translator, teacher, and occasional singer. She is the author of the brand new Joy of Missing Out (Birds, LLC, 2017), the Lambda Award-winning Rise in the Fall (Birds, LLC, 2013) and Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009). She is the recipient of 40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism award from Feminist Press, and the PEN American Center/NYSCA grant for translating It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire by Zvonko Karanović (Phoneme Media, 2017). The anthology of translations The Day Lady Gaga Died: An Anthology of Newer New York Poets she co-edited with Željko Mitić appeared in Serbia in Fall 2011.
At the PhD Program in English at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York she studied New American poetics and alternative art schools and communities, and edited lectures by Diane di Prima for Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Ana has read, taught and performed at Art Basel, Bowery Poetry Club, Harvard, Naropa University, San Francisco State University Poetry Center, the Sorbonne, Third Man Records, University of Arizona Poetry Center, and The Watermill Center. She works and teaches poetry at BHQFU, New York’s freest art school.
Read an essay about all that, The World in Awe.
Ana Božičević
b. 1977
http://www.anabozicevic.com
Born in Zagreb, Croatia, Božičević emigrated to New York City in 1997 and studied at Hunter College and at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her first book-length collection, Stars of the Night Commute (2009), was Lambda Literary Award finalist, and her second book, Rise in the Fall (2013) won a Lambda Literary Award. Of her third book, Joy of Missing Out (2017), Publishers Weekly writes: “Poet and translator Božičević follows Rise in the Fall with another plaudit-worthy collection that is even more humorous, complex, and responsive to the world. Božičević easily harnesses her position as a poet of quiet social revolt, writing in a contemplative voice that questions contemporary powers: the government, the police, the Internet.”
She received a “40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism” award from Feminist Press and a PEN American Center/NYSCA grant for translating Zvonko Karanović's It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire (Phoneme Media, 2017).
Božičević has worked for the PEN American Center, the Center for the Humanities of the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation.
QUOTED: "This book is rawer than anything I wrote in the past, I’m still too close to it. The writing of the poems was a ritual of baring and paring down charged experiences and extreme states of mind through whatever formal means were available to me, to make them legible. For myself, to live, and to communicate what was happening with me in the clearest language I know, which happens to be poetry."
Ana Božičević: On Using Poetry to Make Sense of the World
by Michael Valinsky
February 21, 2017
“AS AN IMMIGRANT YOU SPEND A LOT OF TIME TRYING TO ADAPT, FIT IN, AND SURVIVE, BUT AT A CERTAIN POINT YOU MIGHT FEEL THE NEED TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOUR DIFFERENCE IS NOT SOMETHING TO BE IRONED AWAY […]”
In her newest work, Joy of Missing Out (JOMO), Ana Božičević uses her word bank as would the sky with its stars: she disperses it in such a way as to illuminate the pages and shed light on the complexities of social life. Embedded in the text are Božičević’s wandering eyes, constantly looking up and forward, but seldom backward into the nostalgia of words already uttered. The Croatian-born Božičević is tragically aware of her present: “You’re the only/Person who’s not here/Is it the same/For you.” The memory of the past elicits the harsh realization of reality outside the digital, where one’s thoughts are frequently trapped behind the edges of a screen or subsumed by the global language of social networks. Nevertheless, Božičević always knows how to turn a moment of heartbreak into an absurd post-digital event: “Je commence/the long ascent/out of//the screen–I’m outside!/Omfg. Check it out–//the snow is real.” It’s moment like these that make the text so intimate, allowing the reader into the mind of a complex woman, using writing as catharsis, emotion as fuel, and language as constellation.
In the past you’ve talked about how you like to write in transit, but in JOMO it feels as though the space of writing is the same. There’s more of a contemplative feel rather than a wandering one. What was your process for writing the book?
Most of these poems happened at night–the time of contemplation. But also because I had trouble sleeping the night became this distance to cross, a trip through the underworld on Ra’s ship. Usually a poem was a ticket to sleep, like a release valve. The space of writing JOMO was this: whistling loudly while you walk through the cemetery.
You deploy a kind of 21st century lyricism here. What is your investment in this form? How far do you want to transmute axioms about lyrical poetry?
I mean, it’s a kind of joke almost because lyrical poetry has been around for so long. I am always aware of its continuum. I play into and against modernist and New American poetry and tumblr and old school confessionalism. But more than making a conscious comment, I think I am simply deploying what I’ve learned, to say what I need to say now. Confessional poetry by women (Plath, Sexton) was important because of its legacy of dealing with mental illness. The I of JOMO cycles through intense emotional states. And finds a language for them online, but also looks to lapidary epitaphs on medieval Eastern European tombstones, presocratic fragments, the flatness/intentional simplicity of Stein and H.D., the vision and genius of Audre Lorde for formal and philosophical strategies. Learning. And I really wanted this book to be funny. I was trying to make myself laff! So it’s a tragicomedy maybe. Which all confessions kind of are.
There are many hints of an immigrant’s life in a modern day society that does not accept or adapt. How did this affect your writing and why do you think it’s important right now?
Maybe now it’s easier to say some things that one has been thinking as an immigrant for twenty years in NYC. I was raised in socialism and my ideas of what power is are tied with striving for the good of the community. I want us to be powerful. Reconciling that with North American realities is the challenge. As an immigrant you spend a lot of time trying to adapt, fit in, and survive, but at a certain point you might feel the need to acknowledge that your difference is not something to be ironed away, because trauma–in my case, PTSD–isn’t going anywhere and may hold an insight that should be transmitted in the form of wild or empathetic critique. Poetry is a way to make sense of it all and to figure out how I can be useful. How to help immigrant communities who are at increasing risk in the States? That’s the urgent task now.
How is this work in line with your previous works? Do you consider this a departure?
I didn’t really answer this question the first time, I had my shield up. That’s probably because this book is rawer than anything I wrote in the past, I’m still too close to it. The writing of the poems was a ritual of baring and paring down charged experiences and extreme states of mind through whatever formal means were available to me, to make them legible. For myself, to live, and to communicate what was happening with me in the clearest language I know, which happens to be poetry. When nothing mattered to me anymore, poems and song still got through. Maybe if I sing well enough I will melt the heart of an indifferent giant who might be me. Or a lover, or God or the State. The mythology of this book is pretty particular to itself, sui generis, too, with the Morning Star/Venus as the star feature. “Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!” is a fortune I carry in my wallet. Some of JOMO‘s lodestars: Shuli Firestone’s Airless Spaces & H.D.’s Hermetic Definition.
QUOTED: "another plaudit-worthy collection that is even more humorous, complex, and responsive to the world."
Joy of Missing Out
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Joy of Missing Out
Ana Bozicevic. Birds LLC, $18 trade paper (100p) ISBN 978-0-9914298-7-5
Poet and translator Bozicevic follows Rise in the Fall with another plaudit-worthy collection that is even
more humorous, complex, and responsive to the world. Bozicevic easily harnesses her position as a poet of
quiet social revolt, writing in a contemplative voice that questions contemporary powers: the government,
the police, the Internet. "We should all get to die under the sky," she writes in elegy for Ralkina Jones, who
died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. The speaker of these poems might deny a
revolutionary role--"I don't pretend/ to understand what goes on/ around me/ that's my superpower"--but the
poems ring with the sounds of upheaval. Bozicevic skillfully balances an understanding of modern
communication with a defiance of such digital pervasiveness. As the title suggests, she possesses no FOMO
(fear of missing out): "The industrial revolution didn't/ Save us nor will the digital// Is what I'm thinking."
In saying so, she redirects readers' attentions to more important spaces and conversations; offscreen, she
reminds readers, "The snow is real." These poems speak to "the overlooked, broken, the queer and dark,"
and, just as clearly but more implicitly, to immigrants like herself. Bozicevic's words unify and insist: "Let's
suffer the great glacier together." (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Joy of Missing Out." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820757/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3c7c34f3.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820757
12/24/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514130888509 2/3
Rise in the Fall
Publishers Weekly.
260.44 (Nov. 4, 2013): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Rise in the Fall
Ana Bozicevic
(Birds LLC)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Sexy, audacious, and compassionate in surprising ways, Bozicevic's sophomore effort is about as funny and
smart as poetry gets.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rise in the Fall." Publishers Weekly, 4 Nov. 2013, p. 24. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A351435143/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=86c3c9f7.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A351435143
QUOTED: "a collection that is all the more stunning for its willingness to place its author between the crosshairs of her poems."
12/24/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514130888509 3/3
Rise in the Fall
Publishers Weekly.
260.25 (June 24, 2013): p154.
COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Rise in the Fall
Ana Bozicevic. Birds LLC (SPD, dist.), $18 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-9826177-8-6
Bozicevics determination to expose the unsettling truths of her own desire--her own materialism, sexuality,
and shame--makes for a collection that is all the more stunning for its willingness to place its author
between the crosshairs of her poems. The same voice that dallies with the thought that "God is a daffodil/up
on a greening hill" is always quick to lambast and judge itself by reminding that "this is the whitest shit/I've
ever written." The guilt in these poems is the guilt of the American consumer (nee Croatian emigre) in
conflict with her ego amidst political turmoil. "She wants pearls and she wants revolution," Bozicevic
writes in a poem for Occupy Wall Street. This outrage at the self-canceling promises of the American dream
is seldom as riotous and complex as it is Bozicevics voice, but she refuses to do her audience the disservice
of trying to hide behind "the speaker" in her work. "Let there be no air," she writes in "Casual Elegy for
Luka Skracic" "between what I say and what you hear." Even love, which for safer poets is the enduring
bulwark against the world's injustice, is subject to a kind of apocalyptic unfulfillment in Bozivevics world.
She knows she can't participate in love after she dies, and yet she demands to know how "people make love
when you're dead." She knows she has to die herself, but she needs you to "please love me/while there's still
days." (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rise in the Fall." Publishers Weekly, 24 June 2013, p. 154. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A335070471/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=33dcf2cf.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A335070471
QUOTED: "Bozicevic’s book is full of contradiction and paradox, and in these moments the speaker is simultaneously most enthralled with their world and overwhelmed by it. The thanks the speaker of 'Blessing' gives echoes throughout Joy of Missing Out. Their constant obsession with death draws them further away from engaging with the world that has been built in the book."
Joy of Missing Out
Birds, LLC
reviewed by Brian Clifton
There are very few negative constructions in Ana Božičević’s latest book of poems, Joy of Missing Out. Instead, Joy of Missing Out weaves together the different and often contradictory details of the speaker’s life to create an oversaturated world—definitions are redefined (but their previous meanings kept intact); lies are told and then revealed to be lies; the speaker changes their mind then changes it back. All of these turns and retracings become almost too much for the speaker so that death (real or symbolic) seems to become a preferred state of (non-)being.
But the book doesn’t start this way. Instead, Božičević introduces Joy of Missing Out with a negation.
Blessing
A white stag came up
To me and said you’ll
Never be an artist,
I said thank you,
Thank you.
This short poem establishes some of Joy of Missing Out’s themes. “Blessing” uses positive and negative definitions in conjunction to create a complex pattern. The negation (you’ll never be an artist) positively defines the speaker as not the writer (assuming poetry is an art) as well as creates a gap between the now of the book and the future of its speaker. Given that most of Joy of Missing Out is in present tense, this odd negation of the future creates a Keatsian paradox—like the lovers on the Grecian Urn, the speaker is constantly striving toward non-being (in this case not being an artist), but will never attain it insofar as the book is concerned. “Blessing,” or more accurately the white stag’s pronouncement in the poem, is indirect speech and so creates a positive definition that includes a negative one—the stag said this, I did not.
Like this poem, Božičević’s book is full of contradiction and paradox, and in these moments the speaker is simultaneously most enthralled with their world and overwhelmed by it. The thanks the speaker of “Blessing” gives echoes throughout Joy of Missing Out. Their constant obsession with death draws them further away from engaging with the world that has been built in the book. However, this obsession also pulls them further into it. In “Like,” the speaker wonders “when I die/Who will try to figure out/The last thing that/I liked/Anyone?” The juxtaposition between wanting to disengage with the world (to be dead) and to continue to mine the data of one’s internet persona creates a tension in this poem that looms over the entire book. On the one hand, the speaker knows this world is a false construct (“I really believe this world that/I’m building/Is cool,” and “people have amazing online lives”). But on the other, the speaker knows the internet and social media destroys as much as it heals.
This comes to a head in “Secretly.” The poem braids a few narratives of people whose exterior and interior lives are disjointed (a man comparing a woman’s body to another’s (Susan); Susan flirting with a girl while thinking of a man who killed himself for her (or maybe that was just the plot of “The Dead”); a kid putting 7/11 coffee in a Starbucks cup, etc.). Each narrative has its own device to make the disjunction work—social media, “spacing out to swelling bass” while running, the Starbucks cup. But these devices merely treat the symptoms of disjunction.
And that’s something Joy of Missing Out hints at throughout. The only real escape from the oversaturated world (real life, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is death. Death is the pharmakon to the knowledge that we lead multiple lives that might contradict each other, and the existential angst that comes with that self-realization. Ana Božičević takes the concept of the fragmented psyche a step further than her Modernist forebears. Božičević’s speaker (and the characters that pop up throughout Joy of Missing Out) have the self-knowledge and self-awareness of their own fragmentation, and this awareness acts as a destructive salve to their (and by extension, our own) contemporary malaise. They parody themselves and their world with a deadly seriousness—a tonal balance that is stark and warm at the same time.
Joy of Missing Out presents oversaturation and the contradictions it causes as something that creates and relieves angst. Dread, fear, sadness exist as very real things, but they also exist as jokes. Within the book, every situation is simultaneously serious and a parody of itself. This complex relationship between viewer, the thing viewed, and the resonances between them imbues each experience with a depth of meaning as well as washes them together (with all other experiences). Take for instance “LOL.”
LOL
Life is lol
Love is lol
Pain is lol
The wind is lol
Cats are lol
Dreams are lol
You are awake
When all is lol
If everything is lol, then there’s no real difference between pain and pleasure, wakefulness and sleep, life and death, cats and the wind, dreams and reality (and the list continues). That said, and given lol is something that exists only in a textual realm (i.e. one whose nuance and connotation are constantly left open to interpretation), the contemplated thing is both how these (and indeed all) things are similar/the same and the tiny fluctuations between them, since they are all defined as a term whose meaning is nebulous at best (is the person really laughing out loud, is the laugh derisive, is lol a shorthand for “I agree” or “this pleases me,” is lol genuine or sardonic). The poem, leaving these questions and more unanswered, allows for all possibilities to exist simultaneously.
Ana Božičević seems to have created a world within Joy of Missing Out in which there is an impossibility to choose any one, single step forward. The book holds contradictions simultaneously and equally. And while this creates a pleasure in which one can do all the things they want to do, it also fills every action with anxiety and longing. In the book’s final and titular poem, this comes to the surface. In “Joy of Missing Out,” there is an ambiguity as to whether the person the speaker is addressing is dead or alive.
Somewhere
In that moving cloud
Is a door
I will pass through at death
The moment I’m finally fully
Uploaded into your memory
Don’t groan cos I’m
So obsessed with dying
And this ambiguity imbues a finality to both the speaker and the one spoken to. If death in Joy of Missing Out can be seen as the only means by which one can truly miss out on something, the only true way to cease all other possibilities, then this creates a complex relationship between the speaker and spoken to. If the spoken to is dead, then the speaker lives with and without them simultaneously—a pain that constantly throbs even in their happiest moments. If the spoken to is alive, then the speaker might have created a sense of sadness that hadn’t existed before; now there is the knowledge that what exists now won’t always.
Božičević’s speaker might be “so obsessed with dying,” but they also seem to be obsessed with the particulars and possibilities of being alive. The disjunction between these two states do well to create a tension throughout Joy of Missing Out. While death’s shadow looms over everything, it is both a serious consideration and a parody. Death exists as a final inability to chose anything else, the very last notification in one’s newsfeed, and in that way a release from the angst of our own fragmented lives.
Ana Božičević's The Joy of Missing Out at Lambda Literary
BY HARRIET STAFF
There will be no joy in missing out on this one! Over at Lambda Literary, Michael Valinsky talks to Ana Božičević about her latest collection of verses, The Joy of Missing Out (Birds LLC). The conversation begins by looking at the space The Joy of Missing Out inhabits. From the top:
In the past you’ve talked about how you like to write in transit, but in JOMO it feels as though the space of writing is the same. There’s more of a contemplative feel rather than a wandering one. What was your process for writing the book?
Most of these poems happened at night–the time of contemplation. But also because I had trouble sleeping the night became this distance to cross, a trip through the underworld on Ra’s ship. Usually a poem was a ticket to sleep, like a release valve. The space of writing JOMO was this: whistling loudly while you walk through the cemetery.
Božičević, who was born in Croatia, goes on to talk about how her experience living in New York as an immigrant has shaped her writing. Valinsky asks, and Božičević responds:
There are many hints of an immigrant’s life in a modern day society that does not accept or adapt. How did this affect your writing and why do you think it’s important right now?
Maybe now it’s easier to say some things that one has been thinking as an immigrant for twenty years in NYC. I was raised in socialism and my ideas of what power is are tied with striving for the good of the community. I want us to be powerful. Reconciling that with North American realities is the challenge. As an immigrant you spend a lot of time trying to adapt, fit in, and survive, but at a certain point you might feel the need to acknowledge that your difference is not something to be ironed away, because trauma–in my case, PTSD–isn’t going anywhere and may hold an insight that should be transmitted in the form of wild or empathetic critique. Poetry is a way to make sense of it all and to figure out how I can be useful. How to help immigrant communities who are at increasing risk in the States? That’s the urgent task now.
QUOTED: "The narrative voice's refusal to be legibly “sexy” or “desirable,” to present a coherent narrative of sexuality, is the source of much of the work's strength. All the strands are connected through the permanent state of upheaval, the constant shifting of connections and disconnections, that Bozicevic channels so deftly."
"This is poetry with visible seams, messy and unapologetic."
Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
A Review by Lindsay King-Miller, Book Reviewer
Picture
Rise in the Fall, the second full-length poetry collection by Croatian-born New York poet Ana Božičević, was impossible for me to read at a measured pace. I meant to dole it out over several sittings but ended up devouring it whole, one marathon session sprawled out across my bed. Božičević's first book, Stars of the Night Commute, is one I constantly, compulsively reread, filled with underlining and dog-eared marginalia. Her second collection, the delivery of which I anticipated for weeks, lived up to all my expectations.
Rise in the Fall, more than Božičević's first book, grapples directly with the question of what poetry is and what it can do. These questions are not abstractions; Božičević is concerned with the real-world implications of being a poet, of trying to find beauty or profundity in the displacement and trauma of contemporary life. “What's war?” she writes in “War on a Lunchbreak.” “Eternal countrylessness. / Lady poets writing about cock, / not thinking about gender.” Here, poetry is both the ultimate tangent – a disruption, an afterthought – and the only possible way to translate what is essential. Desire and need, violence and theory, overlap, as later in the poem when Božičević writes,
I know there's war all around me,
and inside there's war: who died, who cheated,
when will she look at me like that,
what language is this, I hope no-one breaks in and rapes us.
I never see sunlight.
Having taken classes with Ana Božičević and attended her readings, it's impossible to hear her work without the lilt of her accent. She writes with a remarkable lightness, with the ability to pivot a line on its heel and never lose the accrued momentum. She writes with a bit of a smirk, a wry self-awareness that neither obscures nor negates the depth of her earnestness. In the middle of “About Nietzsche,” the collection's first poem, Božičević interrupts herself to say,
This is the whitest shit
I've ever written. Truth is, Osama bin Laden
was killed today, two women were shot
in that raid, and yet again
I can't escape this feeling of living in a world of men
whose intricate games
I'm to jeer and cheer, but they leave my head
blank like
a foggy morning.
Božičević writes about queerness, women, war, migration, the experiences that make a person foreign, that make a person a stranger. In “Intervals of Please,” she writes:
Through the war I fondled a picture
of a girl, right in front of that
girl.
Her handshake felt
just like a
handjob.
But when she
stepped on the
mine
her body looked
not cute. Her
leg
soaring through the air
was not cute.
Later in the same poem, she writes, “This poem is meant to be admonishment. / So why am I trying to squeeze beauty into / admonishment.” Božičević's poems flinch toward beauty, impulsively adorning even what is grotesque. The poetic instinct battles with the conscience, as countless other writers have experienced; what sets Božičević apart, however, is that she transcribes the entire push-and-pull, not simply its result.
The poems in Rise in the Fall overflow with awkwardly beautiful self-awareness, with a consciousness of the gap between what the writer wants to say and what poetry can really contain:
I wanted
to write something called:
Portrait of the Immigrant as Your Little Pony.
About how all over America
I travel to sing my song that there is no song
About my bombed body as the site of abandonment,
& I'd be the critical darling, and they'd say She did it –
but nothing
no song came
not anti-song, just nothing.
This preoccupation with writing as a never-ending process could easily become distracting, even gimmicky, if it weren't so obviously heartfelt and handled with such elegance.
These poems are full of bravery and second-guessing, lust and hesitation, self-righteousness and self-doubt. The pressure to confess is complicated by the instinct toward obscurity. Something is always hidden in the gesture of revealing, and yet the desire to tell the truth propagates itself:
So much of my life
I've held out against the forces of green. If
I dive in, I can't stop—
I have to go into the father I abandoned, lick
every individual stone street, write down each
letter.
Here, desire is always present; it's inextricable from the migrant experience, the poet experience, the experience of war. Still, neither wanting nor wanting to be wanted are simple. “Don't moon me with your downtown / provinces—I want to be the kind of monster you don't want to fuck—” she writes in “Casual Elegy for Luka Skračić.” The narrative voice's refusal to be legibly “sexy” or “desirable,” to present a coherent narrative of sexuality, is the source of much of the work's strength.
All the strands are connected through the permanent state of upheaval, the constant shifting of connections and disconnections, that Božičević channels so deftly: “Revolution is everywhere / like god, its nemesis. That's an old quarrel. Parts of the sky / fall down to earth, face down in a field,” she writes in “The Fall of Luci.” This collection is revolutionary in the sense that it is constantly turning, constantly transforming, looking at its subjects from different angles. “I know there's something wrong with this poem,” she writes, “but I'm done trying to clean up any of it.” These poems are constantly comparing themselves to some platonic ideal of poetry and falling artfully, intentionally, short. Their (perceived, perhaps imaginary) shortcomings are their scaffolding, the structure they wear on the outside. This is poetry with visible seams, messy and unapologetic.
QUOTED: "In her latest collection of poems, Bozicevic embraces and confronts this alienating, patriarchal, racist, violent America, as well as the inadequacy of words. The result is poems that ring out through and beyond the lyric. Rise in the Fall is a call to action, to movement, to personal, political, and artistic revolution."
"Bozicevic’s second book ... is composed of incredibly organic free verse that treads into form, tercets for instance, only when the content begs for it. There is no squeezing into too tight shoes in this collection."
"Here is a poet so adept at teetering that she pulls the writer’s scaffolds away to reveal the process of poem-making, which is not always so tidy. The speaker herself seems frequently still, in the center of a disordered world, maybe even stuck satisfied in a burning car, but really she is constantly moving. When you think you know her next move, she proves you right, for a moment, and then dreadfully wrong."
Rise In The Fall
Birds, LLC
reviewed by Emily Brandt
In her essay “We Would Prefer Not To,” Croatian-born Ana Bozicevic* writes, “To produce positive content, to speak an essential lyric of ‘your voice’ and ‘self-expression’ in the face of the alien and alienating, patriarchal, racist, violent context of the America you inhabited seemed simply inadequate.” In her latest collection of poems, Bozicevic embraces and confronts this alienating, patriarchal, racist, violent America, as well as the inadequacy of words. The result is poems that ring out through and beyond the lyric. Rise in the Fall is a call to action, to movement, to personal, political, and artistic revolution.
Bozicevic’s second book, released this year by the ever-impressive Birds LLC, is composed of incredibly organic free verse that treads into form, tercets for instance, only when the content begs for it. There is no squeezing into too tight shoes in this collection. Eileen Myles refers to the book as “radiant,” which it is, and “brilliantly unbalanced,” which is perhaps its greatest strength of many. Here is a poet so adept at teetering that she pulls the writer’s scaffolds away to reveal the process of poem-making, which is not always so tidy. The speaker herself seems frequently still, in the center of a disordered world, maybe even stuck satisfied in a burning car, but really she is constantly moving. When you think you know her next move, she proves you right, for a moment, and then dreadfully wrong.
Bozicevic employs a plurality of registers. For instance, in the same poem, “Casual Elegy for Luka Skracic,” you get “I was on drugs Stuck / a fish up my cunt” and “This is how it happened in the underworld, there was no downtown / there, no uptown, this was midair.” Baseness and beauty, myth and reality, everything gets tied up together in fast motion for the reader to learn from. This is a book of subcellular and transcontinental instructions that defy containment. In “The Day Lady Gaga Died,” Bozicevic writes, “New York School is because / you have to name things in New York. / Otherwise, too much exists.” The poem, like all the poems in the collection, resists any type of naming or neat categorization in favor of embracing the too much that exists.
The poems’ sense of surprise and motion is captured brilliantly in Bianca Stone’s cover and interior artwork. Stone’s drawings are a perfect fit here: they are anachronistic (characters don fatigues, pajamas, military gear, street clothes, nothing), gestural, figurative, and symbiotic. Her drawings convey a sense of “rush[ing] the barricade / in a pearlspray of bubble and light.” The nude and semi-clothed figures illustrate an energized acceptance, an embracing of vulnerability as strength, that the collection speaks to.
This is a book of desperation, courage and humor; of grit and love; and at its heart, of the brilliance of failure. Failure here isn’t tied to fear, but rather to change and to radical acceptance. There is satisfaction in failure and it is celebrated as a visible and beautiful part of the artistic and human process. Susan Sontag, in 1964, wrote, “When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant.” Here, in Rise in the Fall, failure is a thematic concern, and it does not make the poet indignant; it makes her a person, or rather a people (for there is not so much separation between writer and reader in this book), on the rise. Bozicevic’s strength is in being vulnerable and fierce at the same time. She takes her readers on an interactive journey and expects us to be active participants on the ride. She advises: “Mean something. Invent nothing. Change everything.” And she leads by example in these often dialectical poems.
On first read, I did not consider how imperative the collection’s title is. It’s a broad enough directive to apply to any reader, any land, any galaxy—and Bozicevic does not set out to define what “the Fall” is, other than everything in life, in country, in war, in patriarchy, in personal failure, in failure to fulfill gender expectations, in failure to write the perfect poem, and so on. And the “Rise,” again, not so simple to define, but includes the sincere, confident revolution born of introspection and examination and challenging of the systems that define our world. The rise includes the poet, the artist, the Occupy Movement, lake swims, unions, and pearls. And while this collection follows the threads of human thought, it goes beyond thought into action.
Revolution isn’t always obvious, as Bozicevic knows. In “The Fall of Luci,” she celebrates its less-obvious forms: “revolution / lives in tired old bodies walking away from the revolution.” For one of the book’s epigraphs, Bozicevic selected lyrics from The Smiths’ song “Ask”: “If it’s not Love, then it’s the Bomb that will bring us together.” Like Morrissey, who is able to deliver piercing lyrics in an oh-so-dreamy, joyfully pensive voice, Bozicevic uses her own dreamy and ever-clever voice to show us the destructive and redemptive consequences of war. She begins the collection with the poem “About Nietzsche,” in which she writes, “Soon you’ll learn / the song of the pretty bridle is stronger / than the song of the wound that it grooves” only to later go on to write, “This is the whitest shit / I’ve ever written,” and then:
Truth is, Osama bin Laden
was killed today, two women were shot
in that raid, and yet again
I can’t escape this feeling of living in a world of men
whose intricate games
I’m to jeer and cheer, but they leave my head
blank like
a foggy morning.
In down-curved streets of oddly familiar towns whose patisseries
mean everything to someone and
nothing to me. It’s like I’m already dead.
or talking to some apple trees, and yet again
beauty has won in all its casual terror and pain.
Too much exists and she is taking it on. War, patriarchy, patisseries and their beautiful uselessness. And Bozicevic declares the winner in the poem’s final line, but the collection continues to grapple. The imagery, as in this poem, is often of war/patriarchy, but she changes the expectations. The next poem is one of the collection’s strongest. “War on a Lunchbreak” suggests, by its very title, the American tendency to avoid the reality of the wars we partake in, and foolishly believe we can contain in easy doses on, say, a lunchbreak. We have other concerns. She begins with a seemingly simple question and a haunting response:
What’s war? You’re not able to find
the other dark pearl earring, and you don’t really care, except:
that earring’s your brother. He’s dead,
and there was only one, you’ll never see him again.
What’s war?
Later in “War on a Lunchbreak,” Bozicevic makes the connection from war to exile to internalized sexism. She writes: “Eternal countrylessness. / Lady poets writing about cock, / not thinking about gender.” And she goes on to challenge the terminology of war and its collusion with patriarchal forces: “I contemplate / Starving myself / So I’d be ‘the bomb.’” The poem then wonders: “To get degrees, have interests— / is that the anti-war?” The war expands to include the self (“I know there’s war all around me, / and inside there’s war”) before she declares, “I don’t know how to end this.” This poem? This war? The final lines bring us back to the individual in her experience, presumably on her lunchbreak, but also returns us to the insanity of sensation in a world where those we love are killed: “What’s // war? This: / I feel the sunlight but I keep asking why.”
“Intervals of Please” again addresses the bomb and gender. Bozicevic writes: “When you think of the bomb, / even though you pit your / fear // against it, does it / not give you a hard / on?” The patriarchal cock stands up for war. But there’s more to this story than the obvious. She later writes:
Through the war I fondled a picture
of a girl, right in front of that
girl.
Her handshake felt
just like a
handjob.
But when she
stepped on the
mine
Her body looked
not cute. Her
leg
soaring through the air
was not cute. Why am I bringing
this
up? It takes a hard
on to detonate a
Bomb.
The visceral imagery of sex and violence, of the body in bliss and in destruction, disturbs as much as it serves to convince that yes, “It takes a hard / on to detonate a / Bomb.” Bomb is a loaded word that has already appeared in this collection as a lyric from a Smiths tune and a reference to a hot body. Words are in flux, and this bomb has a capital B. The bomb and the body, lust and mass murder are fused together. “What / diffuses // us must love us / but can’t want us to / shoehorn // beauty into shoes.”
War is not the only manifestation of patriarchal contempt in this collection. In “About Mayakovsky,” Bozicevic claims Mayakovsky as her right to discuss, not the right of the suburban American teen stepson. However, it’s not long before she decides that Mayakovsky’s maleness makes him belong more to the boy than to her (“He’s more you than he’s me now”). She momentarily resorts to the domestic sphere, where she makes miracles:
I hope to thin into that era when female people
like me were given hooves & the strength to pull the field over
their stepson, like a blanket. Without kitsch I’m called witch & turn
white stone in a fern forest. Not having been “finished,”
I use the implements of housework
for miracles. Grow the darning needle
into a mast, rag into sail
She transforms the implements of housework into a sailing ship, in effect making the change she is encouraging for all of us.
Bozicevic embraces the poet/reader relationship in all its awkwardness and hyper-intimacy in Rise in the Fall. She rattles and challenges the reader, to stun you with beauty, to horrify, to make you laugh. In “Children’s Lit,” the third poem in the book, Bozicevic writes, “I’m writing in some kind of vernacular / that’s not even my own, just to endear myself to you / am I not endearing?” Whether you find that charming, or relate to its self-consciousness, or resist the sentiment, the message is clear: you and Bozicevic are in this together. What could sound like a self-conscious revelation of the poetic process and the poet’s desire to be accepted is turned on its head. The very next line is “I’m a fat married girl.” Fat. Married. Girl. All three words conjure a slew of societal presuppositions, and the first two make it known that the third is off limits, as if this girl even cares anyway. She shuns you after she tries to endear you. Or perhaps in spite of. Regardless of your personal reaction, these lines embody an intimate framing of the relationship between reader and writer. And this book has so much to do with that relationship, for it’s not a book to be passively consumed, nor is it a manifesto to be followed, but rather it’s art that’s meant to, like food, enter through your blood, embody your cells, and adjust the way you, reader, do things. Again, it’s a call, certainly not an instruction manual, for change.
Bozicevic bares her process throughout Rise in the Fall. In “Death, Is All,” she writes, “Someone please push me out of the way / Of this bad poem like it was a bus.” She ends “Midnight Oil” with the lines: “You want this to mean something? / Then make it. Mean / Something.” Reader, you are implicated in this, which is one of the many pleasures of the collection. And in the title poem, “Rise in the Fall,” she takes it a step further, into dream territory. She writes: “This poem’s boring. I dreamed some lesbian wrote a really good poem / called Pinko and // I woke up to a straight straight world. / Let’s sit here in the café for now. We’ll rise up // next fall, when they can no longer deport me.” She goes on to include the dreamt text of “Pinko” and then continues, “That’s all. Pinko was not even that good but / I can still change everything / about it. // Change everything.”
Changing everything includes changing how we view art. In “About Content,” Bozicevic writes, “I’m told / by other artists: working’s not artful. That’s where you’re wrong.” She refers to “bad poems” as “an art fail” and goes on to say “I’ve failed, thee beautiful / messy jar on a green grassy knoll,” but redeems the experience by stating “most of all / I fail into myself.” The intimacy and depth of failure brings one closer to oneself and the ensuing wisdom makes it worth it. Bozicevic concludes, “I know there’s something wrong with this poem but I’m / done trying to clean up any of it.” There you have it.
In the final lines of “Poem,” the book’s last poem, she writes: “It’s not too late // I say: tell me it’s never too late for this poem, / and then you go:” After plowing head-on into war, love, immigration, revolution, and dismantling of the patriarchy, the final words, “you go” followed by the colon, leave the rest to the reader.
*
Apologies to the author; the Typekit fonts we use don't support the diacritics in Ana's name. We made an editorial decision to maintain the typography of our magazine rather than print this review in Helvetica.
— Doug Hahn
QUOTED: "Ana Božičević writes poetry that believes in poetry. This is no small feat. And I believe her poems. They are entirely credible documents of their own accord. Nothing is laid on too heavy, there’s just enough gutsiness without any nonsense or sentimental bravado. This, too, is no small feat. Writing outwards from deep inside the poem talking about being deep inside the poem, Božičević offers nothing less than the ultimate tour of the inner orders of the world of the poem."
"he impressive part is that the world outside the world of the poem is always the center of concern. Božičević is a “poet’s poet” in so far that she’s intimately addressing poets and poetry in her poems, but the range and scope of her engagement far exceeds that or any other label."
RISE IN THE FALL BY ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ
REVIEWED BY PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN
May 18th, 2013
Ana Božičević writes poetry that believes in poetry. This is no small feat. And I believe her poems. They are entirely credible documents of their own accord. Nothing is laid on too heavy, there’s just enough gutsiness without any nonsense or sentimental bravado. This, too, is no small feat. Writing outwards from deep inside the poem talking about being deep inside the poem, Božičević offers nothing less than the ultimate tour of the inner orders of the world of the poem. The impressive part is that the world outside the world of the poem is always the center of concern. Božičević is a “poet’s poet” in so far that she’s intimately addressing poets and poetry in her poems, but the range and scope of her engagement far exceeds that or any other label.
In “Poem Capitalism” she describes how she practices
this thing I call Objectless
Objectivism. Like: I face the thing, but also
am the thing—so we aren’t. Once, I was content to find
the marble hollow. Filled with a giant star. Now
laved in grease, I rub again against
that dry nubbin in the great warehouse Archyron—(this is not
some reference you’re supposed to get, it’s just this
weird feeling I had.) The yellow frame darkens. I live
in the light but perish in the industrial warehouse,
under the specter of marriage, of hip. Again I wrote
a meaningless poem! and left me
with all the burden of meaning. He died, and she—
We carried her through
Following John Berryman’s lead, Ted Berrigan, in both life and “the poems” succinctly nailed the riff “he died” (“dear Berrigan. He died/ Back to books. I read.” Berrigan’s “Sonnet #2”) Božičević drops in the reference, but then goes further, opening up the question of what about her? And, with the help of claiming a plurality, i.e. “we”, takes the poem beyond where they left off, into a further doorway. Carrying (in fact, rescuing) the speaker of the poem, the body itself, away from the trap that consumed both previous male poets, in life as well as in the work.
Not that death isn’t seemingly everywhere for Božičević. Born in Croatia in 1977, Božičević has been on the fringes at least—if not in the middle of—violent war torn situations. I don’t feel it is poetic fancy when she writes in “Casual Elegy for Luka Skračić”: “I / study from Luka’s textbooks, later he / gets blown up walking to film school, Luka / dies for his art.”
Božičević’s poems are diatribes that refuse become didactic. She’s too busy interrogating herself as much as she is the world, for the poem to slide into meeting easy expectations. In “War on a Lunchbreak” her own gendered sexuality, and that of her friends and the larger society, alongside her past history and current nationality status, caught up between her homeland and her adopted United States, surges to the surface as she reflects upon the hellish clerical job she’s stuck working just to get by. She asks, “What’s war?”
Eternal countrylessness.
Lady poets writing about cock,
not thinking about gender. My friends married in Vegas
to good-ol’-boys or hipster drummers, just ‘cos they can, or
when I contemplate
starving myself
so I’d be “the bomb,” or. I’m sorry
I keep tossing and turning. My livelihood here
depends on people who’ve never tasted
war, and act offended when one leaves work
on time. Not that I ever lay hiding
dying in a ditch, but if I had, I think I’d
know much about dry grass, the incredible value of it:
Simply to see the stalks
move would be enough.
I’d like to have time to type this,
but all day long they’re looking over my shoulder.
Where the poems in Rise in the Fallmay appear to be going in search of death, Božičević is in fact only drawing attention towards realizing life. These poems are affirming her concern with how to live, what’s required, where to find it. As dark as the subject matter gets at times, the over-riding encouragement that this is life, get on with it, is ever just as insistent. Be brave is the message. There’s nothing to fear once you look at things head on.
I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think “Crisp inquiry”
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that’s the kind of death
I’m talking about.
An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and the disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it. And that’s
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you’re all, What? D-E-A-T-H? ‘Cause Amy
that’s all it is, a word, material in the way the lake moves through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven’t yet swum in it. See what I mean?
(“Death, Is All”)
Ana BozicevicBožičević does not mince words. “I’ll tell you straight up: / you don’t get to talk about Mayakovsky: / take that skateboard and go back to the suburbs. And talk about them.” (“About Mayakovsky”) It is totally great to have poems by a relatively young poet so directly address everyday reality while remaining free of pretension. There’s no placating search after any
specific lingo of MFA craft or other academic jargon. Božičević is all-poet, crystal clear about what she wants to say and who her audience is. The humor is rampant. After reading, “A Poem for You” it’s ridiculously difficult (if you could manage it before) to ever look at any My Little Pony with a straight face again:
I want to write a nice long poem for all you straight girls.
Your religion’s rose and glass castles
hold no place for me, I’m out of my princess phase.
Your pink pony wants to fuck you
She’s limp with longing from being
always touched and hollow,
comb-tugged right out of her field:
Oh I’m too tired to worship at your kittenish emptiness.
For years my emptiness echoed into yours: Oh Hai!
For years I’ve been your pony, and I wanted to fuck you
without your pink dress, the glitter and the organs,
all colorless—
But Božičević is not at all just about putting down “straight girls”. As she goes on to say, “I’m over it.” The poem continues unfolding, complicating its own intentions which are, and never should be, entirely clear.
I love someone now, she’s teaching a class,
she had a bad dream & threw the lotion
at the hurtful door, and I love her, there’s nothing hollow there.
There’s no void in the straight girls either, not really.
This yard is in you, ladies,
green and monn-lit, where you prance like difficult adult Bambis:
that’s not desperate, that’s beauty. I only wanted
to have my fill, as I fill her:
undo you first, then balance out the void in a weighted way
so then you’ll know: How
do you do a Barbie?
With meaning. Women, I’ll defend
your beauty
when no-one else will: when you’re lacerated with IVs
and wrinkles, I’ll say how I filled you with Awwww.
When you’re a crazy-eyed teen who hears voices & sings them
out at an American Idol
audition, a sparrow
aping the starsong ringtone–
I’ll get it. I love you when you’re not quite right.
Božičević opens the possibility that poets might strive to be heroes. Not necessarily ‘saving the day’ kind of heroes, but heroes nonetheless.
Look
at any object & see
the shimmer of philosophers playing inside…And they’re
what you want. And it takes a show-off, sacred whore
you say you don’t
believe in, but ecto-drool over, to make
them emanate: and I don’t got that, babe. I’m sitting here,
wet from my run and
know that somewhere among these ducks and squirrels and,
reflected in the car hood, ducks
and leaf silhouettes
is a way for me to manage
the pain of:
all I ever wanted was to serve.
(“We’re the Aliens We’ve Been Looking For”)
That’s not to say that Božičević doesn’t call ‘Bullshit’ on playing out that role. Still, she does both get the girl and is the girl. Plus, she writes it down always telling it straight. No apologies. She’s not expecting anything further from poetry than the opportunity of the poem itself.
QUOTED: "The power of the book is that it captures you on the train, seating you by a window through which a stream of images lulls you to a drowsing that projects on your mind’s eye the strange acuity of a dream. Sometimes the train travels in the sky itself and you find a bit of peace in the expanse, but you can’t escape the haunted route, the ghosts of another’s memories arranging themselves into complex compositions somewhere nearby."
OCTOBER 12, 2010 BY GUEST POSTS
Stars of the Night Commute by Ana Božičević
I.
Beginning
There is a small world nestled in a big sky. The small world has its own sky, land, people, animals, etc. etc., and although the world is small, if you take the world’s train, you begin to see that the world is vast, because the train travels a meandering route in a hypnotic motion.
We get on this world’s train when we read Ana Božičević’s book, Stars of the Night Commute. The passengers are intimates, yet they are covered with a film of remoteness, and the commute at times bores through this remoteness, and at other times travels the periphery. The abiding mystery of this commute is presented through lines in an early poem, “Always the beast has a remote heart.” And then at the end of the same poem, “At the end of poetry the poem can no longer be remote.” This tension between remoteness of the beast’s heart and intimacy of the poem’s heart causes the whole of the book to ache in the way of a taut muscle stretching to span these disparate realms.
How do we get from point A to B when we are involved in the physics of a dream? Is there a point A and point B in the physics of a dream? In the Stars of the Night Commute, there is a starting point, where the window is opened and air flows in. And, at the end of the book, is the closed and summerless room. But, the route between the two also climbs and descends, skips and glides, as we are woven through memory’s scaffolding. And, on this same variegated route, we are led round and round the circular path, an endless mulling that causes a thought to be worn down to a “white pebble.”
The power of the book is that it captures you on the train, seating you by a window through which a stream of images lulls you to a drowsing that projects on your mind’s eye the strange acuity of a dream. Sometimes the train travels in the sky itself and you find a bit of peace in the expanse, but you can’t escape the haunted route, the ghosts of another’s memories arranging themselves into complex compositions somewhere nearby. It is a train that holds the passengers’ pasts so vividly that you are led to enact their memories in real-time. And then a part of you begins to believe it’s your past waiting at the next station.
(Sometimes my dreams will ache the way these poems ache. One of my intimates is covered by a film of strangeness and infused with an obscure breath. I try to connect with them as I would in my waking life, but I can see tiny tears in their corporeal familiarity, and I know that if I were to rip away the facade, I would find, within their inner chamber, the night sky floating its rootless stars.)
The ache is the axis around which the constellations of these poems revolve (stars as the ancient navigators; they place us and diminish us at the same time as they spin their carousel of stories). Here again the remoteness and the intimacy share an improbable space: the distance of stars, the axis that quarters the heart.
The ache in The Stars of the Night Commute is the journey of the poet commuting through an existence that can’t quite give her the substance with which to commiserate, so that her pain and grief become resigned to her internal voice, which searches out plaintively, over ever-shifting landscapes, for an absorbent surface.
II, III, IV
Immersion
(The non-italicized passages are poems and parts of poems from Stars of the Night Commute. The italicized parts are my responses to the passages.)
He showed me this book called “Discovering God.” And guys?
I nearly did choke on the swanning spray of insufferable light—
“Some people can only take seconds
of God’s voice,” he said. But for me
it was, like, the rubbery-awake I get after a slap,
or (not that I did that in a while) after I
write a poem, then open the window
to the naval dawn air.
I see a hawk being chased by sparrows.
And I won’t ever again write simply again
“cause I won’t ever feel
the simplicity of an again bloodthirsty
sparrows.
The air is filled with anomalies. You can catch the anomalies in a net, but as soon as they’re snared, they grow large jaws and haunches and are easily able to tear the mesh and bound, unstoppable, to their kingdoms.
Always the beast has a remote heart.
“Cross seven seas, beyond two hills as two
Lambs facing each other, in a meadow fine as my lady’s kerchief, a boar
Grazes:
Inside the boar’s a hound.
Inside the hound a rabbit.
Inside the rabbit a grey dove.
Inside the dove
At the end of poetry the poem can no longer be remote
(Each desire’s minutia: so complex that the archetypes chisel themselves out of each other, freeing their pent-up limbs.)
I pick up the flesh figurine that has emerged from the plastic beast and am amazed by its warm hands, a sign of good circulation.
And I pull the hand to the apex of my lens because it is the fingertip whorls I want to enter as a stone enters a pond.
And wouldn’t it be cool if Bloomberg was Prez?
Or wait, I know: Trump! (It would be
awesome. Now spit out those feathers—)
Rid your mouth of the sorrowing of sparrows
We cut into the contemporary and find veins that flow with crude oil, but along comes “sorrowing of sparrows” to show us how to cry our eyes out and onto
the socketed terrain.
Is the poet free from tyranny or complicit as she bears each
word
the body-source of each rivulet.
Because you can’t touch cloud.
What you want to say is cloud.
Peak light on the mountain
at high noon it is easy to forget the abilities of night’s
apex
like how it can lend
a blind ear
to a disarray of pleas.
Out of the body of a dead dachshund A mountain of luxury. Asleep in its branches was luxury, badgers born blind into luxury—their crying was luxury, above all luxuries. But love was usury. It counted the pennies of the person, chanted Dog in the yard where there was no dog.
something lost inside us
the Dog
fights for the smallest
gulp of air
uneven breathing
righting itself, barking hollowed-out
to howl.
So sorry, dear star that came before the night
Sunset,
why are you so often forgotten? Why are we startled to move our eyes from screens
to windows to find
that, unbeknownst,
all has turned night?
first
Sadness plus finance equals luxury. Commerce plus treetops is travel. What then of the mountain? Once upon a time in a far off land, there lived a kind Louis Vuitton the Third. For a summer job he worked at the Dairy Barn on Broadway, and there, quite by accident, he fell in love.
later
Something was off. King looked and saw dachshund had ossified, and then walked around the still body, it was just a front, with a stick from behind. Where was Dog? King tore his stole in sadness and started walking.
later still
The clouds raced together to form a pretzel. It pointed to something dirty. The joke was something to laugh about – almost nothing, but he knew he made contact – like two flavors perfect together, the indoor palace everyone talked about Each little thing a luxury good Or the star he had read of, that shines in the sunset: a root. His status as leaf.
King without Dog—a familiar scenario
Atop the mountain with a cloud on either side of his leaf
(remember, this flat mouth was once a root)
King looks out at sunset and absorbs.
III.
I’m on a train with passengers
that all hold a menagerie behind
their plastic skin (plastic because this is the substance
given us
to mold the modern).
passenger1, your menagerie is by far the largest. And inside your menagerie is the Zoo, with the animals that say, “Why have we been trapped behind these translucent bars that surround us like a breeze?”
If the world’s time is God, and she’s birds
atwitter, then why must I go to work?
The answer writes itself:
left to my own devices I’d just sink into the soil.
That is, write, with dirt
as my pillow.
Sit under the mud-sky for long enough with the month’s stratum liquefying and pouring out from between your legs…
Show me the bouquet!
If you do, I won’t tell on you
to the rose of the world. She can make him hear you up there.
Besides, it’s not a cliff, it’s a chair.
And the rose is God.
Got it?
Gott it?
That is why women should be president.
When you pull a thorned bouquet from your mouth, is it the opposite of how the men eat fire?
The bleeding almost staunched…
face the rabbit that comes at the end
of autumn, meaning “nothing,” &disappears
among the leaves—
fertility of “nothing” :
The poet writes in pure snow with pure snow as ink The poet becomes frost bitten and frost gnawed, and then when the poet writes “frost” in the snow with snow-ink, we feel numbness set into our arms. We feel that frost multiplies like rabbits within our pores.
White
out
Rabbit-husband
are you scared
of this thing behind the wallpaper? It’s
silence
silence stored behind wallpaper
you
behind wallpaper affixed
with a thin skin.
Dearly beloved, we are re-gathered here today to carefully remove wallpaper from the castle, to free man and wife from utter silence, to bestow upon them rabbits and shadows.
The soul was painted over and over, like an outlet.
The Soul: its interchangeability makes it the perfect garment. Let’s gather the chairs around the soul and eat slugs.
passenger 2, open your shirt like a venetian blind so that we can see through your window to the interior weather.
It’s raining &
little-ones-of-rain
are talking to him.
“Color is torment.” Or:
“Fool, your book is getting wet.”—
cackling like peppercorns
from the bright green. (I
get now what he said about brick:
it’s relentless, eaten
by history. Eye-blue acidity
aging
all it’s touched.) O bomb
of the world seen and unseen!
If he told them to shut up,
the talking would cease.
But he’s in the room without decisions.
Stand below the leaves of ivy holding baubles of rain that you can touch and watch shake in their skin.
careful not to release them
that name’s an
empty
water bottle. Someday its sound
will be emblem
of my temperance. But now?
it’s sorrow.
passenger 3, we are constantly left wondering, who have our accidents maimed?
What poem will come from the wound?
my mind is simple, I’m just feeling these days, crying over my old dog
my mind’s just simple, it’s feeling my days, a dog crying out. These old
tablecloths
(Have you ever tried the trick where you yank something out from under something else and the something once on top merely wobbles in the wake of the absence of the thing that was yanked?)
But you needed something to shatter
Amy, Amy, at this distance you’re
the smell of liver,
tinnitus that keeps me up, afraid:
your fortressness must now be tested.
The way you took me in without
a surfeit click or
gesture: seagull kerchief
binding my gut to safety
on the swimming haul
among night-images. I went to the place I was born
and it plainly was a bride. So I ran after her.
When she turned into a star I swallowed her.
And out of this uneasiness will come
an aster.
These are the ways to speak: tightly woven around an object, trailing a verb like wake, the tongue-language of bitch-ass, through a mini-book opened to seagull written with seagull ink.
Passengers 4 &5, I see that your plastic undershirt protects you, but the empty leash hangs from your heart…
Carried you this far. Dachshund in the snow. Lights
wink, now— I can’t take another step— Why
push against me with your little red foot, so? For
tens and tens of blocks, & belly-up, and wheezing
later
we’re at the gate. Say, Mother! This is John I carry. A thing
drilled him invisibly—and now he make a hollow sound, a little like
a bathtub. Is it alright to bring him in? He’s heavy, and I—Oh. I see.
No. What, leave him here
for nuns to find? Walk back? (O I won’t make
it back)—we’d passed some hundred
restaurants—I have no money—and it rains—
You are gathering sleet that someone said was rain,
keeps insisting, “it’s rain”
but we hold our black gloves out and they are spotted with constellations.
You are taking wheezing dogs to gates and we are still married to them, still sporting the matching rings, although one is thinner, like a reed.
Walk hand-in-hand with your dog for so far and then, suddenly, your dog is gone and your empty hand is a paddle against the air, turning you in circles.
(When I had one thought
for months at a time. When I wore it
to white pebble.
Like a young horse
of a single color—)
IV.
Now, all of us sit with our tableaus arranged behind our wispy breastbones
and we are slowly drawn forward
Swept many thin things are
sideways in blue and pink
with whose broom, the evening sky
grand not speaking not a question
The rose thorn punctures the throat
she says, war, and plugs the small hole with tar
swallow a rose bouquet and then
swallow a war. What color
blooms inside?
And look: roses wait, the widowers.
Their brief terms are Nordic, a violin concerto.
Each is a number: an ardor in order.
Like them he is measured against pearly histories.
Releases that rudder. A little bit lower—
(You’ve almost forgotten–): There, we’ve both signed it.
He plays at being a thorn.
endurance is felt as the thorn inches deeper. What has been withstood, stood within the hour of emptied-out asters.
(the poem knows its limits, that is the Thing of the poem.)
On the shore of blue/pink sauntering in: We’ll find small, bleeding objects nestled in the sand, We’ll say, “My beloved, from which war did you arrive over waves?”
(The memory of a book of plastic cadavers and their innards, lovingly crafted and rested on black felt. An exquisite room, many chambered, dark red, blue/black, dappled by light through skin, latticed by light through ribs)
The caption: The heart laid open.
the sea and the sky and the stars, yet I keep collapsing inward.
(In our garden the vagrant would sleep
like this, under a low tree
in the center of a circle of cobbles.
I was turning circles like a weather vane. You nudged me from sleep and said, “Check your pockets to see if you are that vagrant…”
I’m almost crying, sewing, barking: almost slowing
down. What’s slain? Your name: a large curvy
European key. The hall door opens. Hall smells
of an old lion’s thoughts in a Zoo. You enter, close
opened windows. Your room’s summerless.
V.
End
“Always the beast has a remote heart.”
These poems equip us with all kinds of eye-pieces, micro to macro to mercurial.
They help us remember the kind of hearing that no one has been able to draw in anatomy books.
They open a nose that parts the stale ocean with fragrance and incise a tear duct within our third eye.
These poems inflate from our hearts like airbags that keep going out, past our collision and into the atmosphere.
They wear our hearts down to a small stone that we can skip across the sea.
They put us on a train that takes us to cold mountains, to hell’s orchard of chairs, to the gate, to blue washes over stars, to the master trailing the Dog-star, to the sunset before stars, to the stale and summerless room…and when we look out the window, we see, at the edge of the outermost regions of our sight, enveloping the whole commute, the dense inner petals of the rose.
“At the end of poetry the poem is no longer remote”
***
Kim Parko lives in Santa Fe, NM with her husband and dog. She is the author of Cure All (Caketrain Press, 2010)
QUOTED: "Stars of the Night Commute is a tremendous first book by a poet who has been publishing for some time now."
"One distinctive feature of Bozicevic's work is that her poems work well together, that is, not only telling stories individually, but also in the form of several series. This in turn means that the book as a whole is a very open yet coherent collection."
STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE
REVIEWED BY JEROEN NIEUWLAND
April 12th, 2010
Stars of the Night Commute is a tremendous first book by a poet who has been publishing for some time now… One distinctive feature of Božičević’s work is that her poems work well together, that is, not only telling stories individually, but also in the form of several series.
On the cover of Ana Božičević’s Stars of the Night Commute, a tower is lifted by the crescents of two luminous moons, hanging from them by two straps that are connected to its surface by wheels. The night sky is filled with stars. The tower resembles some kind of contraption, a ‘pataphysical machine perhaps (a machine of the possible). This scene is the painting ‘Icono’, a fantastical triptych by the female para-surrealist painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963), enclosed by two wooden panels. And in the same way that the panels open up to the scene of the tower, the tower invites the reader in to a similar world of wonder and fragile irony.
The image invites you in not just because it is the book’s cover, but because both the painting and Ana Božičević’s poems capture similar sensations; that of the distant but imminent, blazingly luminous, yet nocturnal commute. Like the painting, the poems in this book, both in themselves and as a whole, form wondrous stories. In a sense they are failed stories, stories that tried to be, but are reshuffled by a secret that leaves them incomplete, for (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen) they are cracked open to let in a glowing light.
Stars of the Night Commute is a tremendous first book by a poet who has been publishing for some time now. Divided into three main sections – ‘The Stars on the 7:18 to PENN’, ‘Night Passengers’, and ‘The Long Commute’ – it collects poems from four previously published chapbooks. One distinctive feature of Božičević’s work is that her poems work well together, that is, not only telling stories individually, but also in the form of several series. This in turn means that the book as a whole is a very open yet coherent collection (reminiscent in this sense of Jack Spicer’s serial poems).
The poems themselves typically have a fragmented narrative quality to them and do not usually come full circle. These poems might be seen, not primarily as linear, but as constellations of ideas that have body and dimension as well as being open and porous, like a cloud, or a fluffed-up ball of cotton, and indeed in ‘Ode to Cotton’ we read, “The catch in your breathing – / a white bit of cotton…Hope lives in the cotton: // and I could pray to cotton.” These lines are quite typical for Božičević. A gentle sincerity that invokes a sense of the holy in simple everyday objects and situations. Here is an example from the final section:
i. Rhode Island
From water and wood
you build on the jetty
a shrine, and place
1. an acorn
2. a button
on the salt-worn planks.
(O traveller. Grey star.
From your hat, when you upend it,
your small family upturn their faces.)
And morningly
nebulae, red-throated
waterbirds,
typestrokes of
fish
visit the shrine
(to view the film
of a coat, departing).
Eileen Myles writes in a blurb, ‘[I]n poetry at some point you don’t know what the writer means. In Ana’s work I watch ‘it’ vanish (all the time) & I trust it.’ Now I wouldn’t say that in all poetry you at some point don’t know what the writer means; but I completely agree that reading Božičević’s poetry can feel like something is vanishing before your eyes.
However, these fleeting moments are not allowed to slip out of the poem (letting the poem collapse), but remain caught inside of the poem, like flickering fireflies in a glass jar (or like ‘typestrokes of / fish’). The poem does not slip away from you as if in quicksand, but invites you in amid the vanishing. Here is a typical example; part one of the eight-part poem ‘Some Occurrences on the 7:18 to Penn’:
He showed me this book called ‘Discovering God.’ And guys?
I nearly did choke on the swanning spray of insufferable light –
‘Some people can only take seconds
of God’s voice’, he said. But for me
it was, like, the rubbery-awake I get after a slap,
or (not that I did that in a while) after I
write a poem, then open the window
to the naval dawn air.
I see a hawk being chased by sparrows.
And I won’t ever again write simply again
‘cause I won’t ever feel
the simplicity of an again bloodthirsty
sparrow.
Oppositions abound in these poems. The general tone is light and playful, often characterized by a specificity and intimacy that is reminiscent of Frank O Hara’s famous style of incorporating names, times and dates in his poems. In Stars of the Night Commute there are specific sites like a train commute on the 9:17 train to PENN, sections devoted to particular characters (God, Amy, Sebastian). “Amy / there is a swan in your breathing / there always is,” and in a next poem: “you and I are servants of birds.” This makes the poems very local and contemporary. In one poem God is accompanied by two emoticons, in another ‘God is President, She’s Rose of the World’. But the appearance of God as a female president illustrates that Božičević is not averse to interweaving layers of socio-political critique. And intimacy here goes hand in hand with distance and various allusions to conflict. “WHAT PASSES FOR EUROPE // BOMBS. JUST LIKE US PASSING FOR LIGHT.”
Ana Božičević, we are informed, was born in Zagreb, 1977 and emigrated to America in 1997: short factual statements that hint at a much more complicated history. In any case, America is probably as good a candidate as any to take in the impact of these poems. For what is America for better or worse, if not – just like these poems – a blooming place of endless contradictions, constant becomings of “almost America,” just like out of these poems stars bloom and poetry is no longer remote, yet continually on the move. “The flower of the mouth. In language the earth blossoms toward the bloom of sky,” writes Heidegger. And Ana Božičević replies:
Listen: stars are blooming.
Out of me. And I’ve become a blooming place. Almost
America –
QUOTED: "Bozicevic is anything but inert. She is a traveler and translator of event, history, outcome and motivation. Stars of the Night Commute is a comi-tragic triumph, a necessary document that transcends the flux and drive of ordinary language, that deranges the asters called ‘pattern’ into a chaos of awesome and terrifying matter."
This piece is about 5 printed pages long.
It is copyright © Nicole Mauro and Jacket magazine 2010. See our [»»] Copyright notice.
The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-bozicevic-rb-mauro.shtml
Nib
BOOK REVIEW
Ana Božičević
Stars of the Night Commute
reviewed by
Nicole Mauro
72 pages Tarpaulin Sky Press http://www.tarpaulinsky.com Paper USD 14 9780982541609
Ana Božičević
Ana Božičević
1
Ever let something go
then watch it from afar?
Now you’re not so sure —
applause
(ii, from ‘Some Occurrences on the
7:18 to Penn,’ 12)
2
In Ana Božičević’s Stars of the Night Commute ‘something’ could be love, language,war, God, a dachshund, New York City, any one of several sparrows, that time of the month, stars, the sky, time, home, Amy, rain, a tuba player, several more stars, the night, the day, Sebastian… and transporting us across all this disorienting, topical ‘scape are the ever-present, ever-reliable, ever-moving trains of Penn station, acting as mental bearings amidst the hustle of the NYC-to-whatever-Eastern-seaboard-destination commute, and as the literal deliverers of the embattled and war-weary Croatian/Bosnian/Serb/Muslim/Christian/Jew to and from the disappearing and reappearing places in what remained of Yugoslavia in post-Tito Yugoslavia, which, we now know, could mean either damnation or rescue.
3
Franz Wright writes on the back cover that Božičević is able ‘to render scenes’ with‘lyrical immediacy,’ that she has, in her Molotov-cocktail of a book, created a somnambulant world wherein she/we will ‘soon awaken to discover the terror was not a dream.’ Is there lyrical immediacy? Absolutely. ‘It’s unlikely you remember the air/awhirl thick and green like a grasshopper’s thigh/or the waiting’ (9). Is it dream-like? ‘in the warm brown mud — bewarethe eggs/hatched there. Lives, damned lives — /the eggs will expose you’ (9). Oh yeah. I’d say a book warning of hatching eggs, that contains strange people on public transportation, ‘bloodthirsty sparrows,’ bombs — not metaphorical, but factual ones — and happy and sad-face emoticons can accurately be characterized as a bewildering place of wildly unpredictable, and, in Božičević’s case, incredibly entertaining associations made without permission of the conscious brain. And Wright is right — there is terror too. But there is verve, exuberance for life, and wickedly perverse insight, where the unfathomably awful is depicted with such glee for language, with such unadulterated syntactic abandon, I can’t help but enjoy the terror, and therein lies my conflict. As a (I’ve been told) relatively nice human being who actively dislikes the suffering of other human beings and generally thinks war and its accompanying terrors to be a wretched affair, it’s a weird thing to say I enjoy, really, truly enjoy, Božičević’s verse mash-up of joie-de-vivre and misery, hilarity and anguish.
Let me be clear. Božičević isn’t making merry of strife and war, but she understands memory and dreams are unregulated, untamed areas of grey matter, that, no matter how hard we might try to train them to, don’t give a drat about past images fitting present event. The subconscious surprises us with images at even more surprising times, and propriety and respectability, the appropriate thing to think at the appropriate time, fall by the cognitive wayside. Croatia and contemporary New York City, and the people still in and no longer in them, conflate. Rather than hold back, or censor, she gives us the entire disorder of the collective re-collective landscape. Instead of selecting and arranging, Božičević deranges our senses à la Rimbaud; there is anarchy instead of hierarchy, freedom instead of focus, where every image is equal, liberated from the control of authority/ poet. Take the poem ‘Sex’:
4
Sebastian, why
do you wear a girl’s dress?
I didn’t care. I only hoped I wouldn’t
die, so we’d catch the film
on Wednesday. Willing captive
of a color — your
slightly
fringed around the edges soiled
eternity ensemble — I
was your mother? Lived only
on salt And in bed
you’d take off your
spectacles — “Thank you, I’m sorry,” you say.
The night goes rain and saffron: (36).
5
Božičević is an émigré from Zagreb, Croatia, born there in 1977, who came to the US twenty years later. I am assuming Božičević then came of age in the middle of one of the cruelest and most politically confusing civil wars in recent, recent history, that entering puberty in a country dying as fast as its citizens has enabled in her a faculty for word-animating bombs and slaughter (based on direct experience, as it has to be) a human being just shouldn’t have. If I hadn’t been so rigorously trained against using the assumed biography of a poet to analyze her poems I would. But academic responsibility isn’t what prevents me from engaging in this form of criticism. Though Božičević’s work does terrify, and so, by extension, is rightly ‘about’ terror, to focus on Stars of the Night Commute as a book of war-poems or terror-poems would too squarely box the work into the political when Stars is more accurately (and happily) about what an émigré does, heart and eyes in tact and hungry for the redemptive and the beautiful, after having experienced all that is contrary to the love and kindness (that can be) human beings.
6
Whether because of biography or lyrical gift, Božičević’s got it, and the poem ‘Home’ is a bit of genius providing the evidence. In it, the narrator speaks of an unnamed ‘he’ who can’t shut the noise of the bomb-blast up, or make decisions — not because he is weak or hesitant, but because, Božičević shrewdly observes, he, like his country, is bereft. It isn’t indecision; there are simply no more decisions left to make. This should be dispirting, disheartening, dis-everything, and most of all depressing, but the images shift ever so seamlessly there is undiluted observation where there could be macabre dwelling, and Božičević’s unfettered memory replaying the scenewithout filter, fear, or concern for the linear.
7
cackling like peppercorns
from the bright green. (I
get now what he said about brick:
it’s relentless, eaten
by history. Eye-blue acidity
aging
all it’s touched.) O bomb
of the world seen and unseen!
If he told them to shut up,
The talking would cease.
But he’s in the room without decisions. (33)
8
Imagistically, a lot is happening in this poem — peppercorns, bricks, history, eye, bombs, ‘them,’ ‘he,’ all in the same poem/‘room.’ If the associations weren’t so perfect, if the sound work were faulty, the poem might read scattershot, and the potency of ‘his’ helplessness would be lost. ‘Green,’ ‘eaten,’ ‘seen,’ ‘unseen,’ and ‘cease’ are phonetically long e words stretching scenically in such a way ‘Home’ reads longer than it is, thus mimicking the temporal briefness of the bomb going off and the emotionally fraught and terrifyingly prolonged fear and anxiety ‘he’ experiences as all the world outside is bombed. The only sense one can make of such a situation is onomatopoetic, where sound comes before name.
9
In addition to aural association, Božičević also employs psychological association, a popular poetic method, and one she does better than most. Because the images the associations produce are surprising — sometimes shocking — they awe, and we are even more awed as we read on and come to find these surprising images eerily dead-on. How she knows the images, the associations, are dead-on is not so easy to explain. Božičević’s poetry is agile and energetic, is New York school-flavored, though if I had to singularly categorize I would say she is more accurately a capital ‘I’ Imagist in that her ocular appetite is wonderfully indiscriminate and omnivorous, but is concrete and unerring in her choices, is always intense and unpredictably moving, and so is, because of, is even more capital ‘V’ Vorticist than ‘I’ Imagist, is a poet of extreme vision who, to quote Vorticism’s architect Mr. Pound, ‘desires the more intense, for certain forms of expression are “more intense” than others’ (90). Božičević’s poems read — and this is one of my favorite effects — as ‘real’ dreams, as places where the horizon between wake and sleep blur with crystal clarity, creating not humor, but a manic absurdity where a hyperactive world transpires around, and inside the mind of a person who is inert.
10
Božičević is anything but inert. She is a traveler and translator of event, history, outcome and motivation. Stars of the Night Commute is a comi-tragic triumph, a necessary document that transcends the flux and drive of ordinary language, that deranges the asters called ‘pattern’ into a chaos of awesome and terrifying matter.
Work Cited
‘Vorticism.’ Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970. 90.
Nicole Mauro
Nicole Mauro
Nicole Mauro has published poems and criticism in numerous journals. She is the author of the chapbooks Odes (Sardines, 2003), Dispatch (co-authored with Marci Nelligan, Dusie, 2006), The Contortions (Dusie, 2007), and Tax-Dollar Super-Sonnet (Pendergast/Dusie, 2009). She is the co-editor of an interdisciplinary book about sidewalks titled Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Space (with Marci Nelligan, ChainArts, 2008). Her first full-length poetry collection, The Contortions, was just published by Dusie in 2009, and her second, Tax-Dollar Super-Sonnet Featuring Sarah Palin as Poet, is due out from Black Radish Books in 2010. She lives in the San Francisco bay area with her husband Patrick, and daughters Nina and Faye. She teaches rhetoric and writing at the University of San Francisco.