Say Fire

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

Wounded bodies are at the heart of Say Fire. Bodies cringe and crouch (years after the war) as fireworks shoot through the sky, bodies fail from cancer in peacetime, bodies collapse into local headlines and reports. The body remembers but seems to learn nothing, Selma Asotic says, her own body mummified by shadowed histories and doubt. With precise lyrical grace, Asotic winds us past these fragments, these questions, into rooms where lovers lie “gorged on light,” their bodies alive and blossoming. A hand on the small of the back might dissolve all rage – all fear – conviction that one has survived.

Born in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asotic writes in a feverish present tense, tracing her family history in close lyric and careful reportage. “That’s how/ every history begins./ Something bursts, and everyone clutches their chests to see/ if it is they who burst.” Leaning into her own recursions, hesitations, and doubt, Asotic alchemizes language into something corporeal. With lines that conjure the chimeric turns of Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Marina Tsvetaeva, Asotic illumines a life lived in the wake of war – the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves retracting their gestures.