Say Fire

(Paperback)

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Bosnian poet Selma Asoti's fearless debut on memory and resistance Bosnian poet Selma Asoti's fearless debut on memory and resistance Wounded bodies are at the heart of Say Fire. Bodies cringe and crouch (years after the war) as fireworks shoot through the sky, bodies fail from cancer in peacetime, bodies collapse into local headlines and reports. The body remembers but seems to learn nothing, Selma Asoti says, her own body mummified by shadowed histories and doubt. With precise lyrical grace, Asoti winds us past these fragments, these questions, into rooms where lovers lie "gorged on light," their bodies alive and blossoming. A hand on the small of the back might dissolve all rage - all fear - conviction that one has survived. Born in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asoti writes in a feverish present tense, tracing her family history in close lyric and careful reportage. "That's how/ every history begins./ Something bursts, and everyone clutches their chests to see/ if it is they who burst." Leaning into her own recursions, hesitations, and doubt, Asoti alchemizes language into something corporeal. With lines that conjure the chimeric turns of Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Marina Tsvetaeva, Asoti illumines a life lived in the wake of war - the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves retracting their gestures.

Reviews

Rich and multi-dimensional . . . Asotis work presents a layered portrait of consciousness that readers can find themselves in and find opportunity to be challenged. Stacy Mattingly

The concept of home is highly coveted and rarely concrete, but writer Selma Asoti explores the possibility that home is not entirely physical. As a bilingual poet from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asoti has grappled relentlessly with a sense of belonging, finding refuge in the art of literature. Daily Free Press

"In Say Fire, Selma Asotis masterful debut, the flames of language present a Mobius strip of history and memory and the never-endingness of war. How fast the shadows lengthen when you try to outrun them, she writes. And while the outrunning may be impossible, the witnessing, with its hamster wheel of suffering, grenades and lossand also love and tenderness and resolveis not. In this arresting reckoning, Asoti writes: I think of you/ in as many ways as the rain falls. Its a searing rain and fire she gives us, and an all-too-timely reminder of the untiring half-life and brutality of war." Andrea Cohen

Author Bio

A Sarajevo-born, bilingual writer, Selma Asoti earned dual BA degrees in English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Sarajevo, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she worked closely with Robert Pinsky. She's interested in poetry and revolution. She's taught writing to undergraduates at BU and NYU, and ESL to adult learners at community-based organizations in Sarajevo and New York. She's also worked as a translator and interpreter. Her first book of poetry was published in both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 2022 and was awarded the Stjepan Gulin Prize in 2022 and the Stefica Cvek Prize in 2023.