Say Fire

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

In a pocket, Asotic finds a brood of planets. In the wind, a cathedral of voice. And in the throat, a thorn bush hums. She slakes her thirst with briny water, and later, tucks a thorn under the tongue. Ready to speak. The poet’s voice is warm with questions, recursions, and doubts. ＂Do you remember nothing from your life?＂ she asks, observing the challenge of memory and family history in the wake of the Bosnian War. The poet recalls men returning from war, with bodies no bigger than marbles in a palm. A bullet may pierce through a door and become a peephole. Through it, Asotic can see the myths of war - that shrapnel makes men celestial - or fragments of her own mayhemmed matrilineage. Her lines, blossoming and chimeric, search for a home, and a mother, in peacetime. Her language is alchemized into the corporeal, illumining the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves washing away their gestures.

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