Praise
“In my head is a circle farm,” asserts the speaker in Say Fire’s opening poem. Pulsing with anxiety and refrain, the book probes the circling of history, war, migration, memory, longing, and the struggles carried across families and borders. The speaker lives in the gash between home and the new country as one haunted, resistant, and fiercely loving. Selma Asotić’s range is broad, her voice—both fearless and tender—a new sound.
— Stacy Mattingly
The concept of home is highly coveted and rarely concrete, but writer Selma Asotić explores the possibility that home is not entirely physical. As a bilingual poet from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asotić has grappled relentlessly with a sense of belonging, finding refuge in the art of literature.
— Daily Free Press
Say Fire, commands Selma Asotić. She could add, say flesh. For everything here is seared on the body: memory, the sounds and sights and aftershock of war, intimations of mortality, archives of loss and grief, but also the splendour and symphony of desire, of love… There are poems we read, and then there are poems that write themselves on us, imprinting themselves on the retina, on the soul; ones whose lines throb with the potency of fissile material, their enjambments with the grace of cosmic choreography. Say Fire is a collection replete with the latter. I felt the poems imprinting, increasingly convinced I’d be set ablaze before closing the book.
— Karthika Nair
In Say Fire, Selma Asotic’s 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 loss––and also love and tenderness and resolve––is not. In this arresting reckoning, Asotic writes: I think of you/ in as many ways as the rains falls. It’s 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
Selma Asotić's Say Fire arrives as a rare and mesmeric force, a fever dream of language from which one refuses to wake. “Hear me speak . . . my voice / wide as daybreak”—and out of these utterances come stunned songs, poems vast in their reach. Say Fire is replete with restless ghosts and griefs, with rich desires, with wars that follow one “through continents / in rugged caravans”, and with the charred landscape of collective memory. Paying rapturous attention to the realm of the unsayable and of what evades the clench of memory, Asotić’s lines are estranging and synesthetizing, to electrifying effect. Say Fire is sui generis, and Asotić’s talent is utterly unmistakeable.
— Jenny Xie
Words “are like teeth,” our speaker tells us, preparing us for the sharpened incisors these poems will bare. Steeped in the fear of not being able to bear witness, the words here are not only like teeth; they are also like rocks holding the fluttering world down, like pinpoints of light, like little detonations clearing out a space so that the real may appear. While a suicide bomber watches syndicated comedy, the intelligence of the poem notes, “safety pins, shawls / caught in car wheels, knots, snowdrops, / I have a head,” and we are, alongside this speaker, awake to the whole world.
— Eleni Sikelianos
A vivid debut poetry collection by the Bosnian poet Selma Asotić touching on the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars in the nineties, the political valence of fire, legacies of violence, and the meaning of memory. Forthcoming from Archipelago in September, and excellent.
The tender depiction of interior space that runs through Say Fire is like a refuge from history.
— Susan Stewart
Say Fire strikingly anthropomorphizes war, showing its constant, embodied presence . . . [Asotić’s] courageous poetic voice singing lesbian desire in Bosnian, switching between its torments and enchantments . . . takes the readers’ breath away.