At Verse, Mary Austin Speaker reviews Ana Božičević’s Stars of the Night Commute.
Two of our favorite paragraphs among the abundant excellence that is Speaker’s review:
Although it is dangerous to make presumptions about the way one’s biography inflects their poetry, I think it’s helpful to consider the conditions of Ana Bozicevic’s native country when she left it. Croatia’s is a history of conflict in which voices speak over each other. Stars of the Night Commute, the author’s first collection of poems, suggests that since her emigration she has been learning how to write her own history while rejecting the very idea of writing history….
The poems in Stars of the Night Commute disrupt, they bother, they tease, they nudge and cajole and apostrophe. We are not to be hypnotized (although some poems are inarguably gorgeous). We are not to fall lamely under a sonorous spell (although some poems use sound masterfully to prick our ears). We are supposed to pay attention, and if we don’t recognize what’s been placed in front of us, she’s betting on the fact that we have, regardless, understood a mood, a tone, a something, and that, without the architecture of more linear poetry, is exactly what makes her work an experience unto itself. Her poems laugh at themselves, and they laugh at you. They also weep at themselves and weep at you. And complain and instruct and adore and puzzle.
Please click here for the whole review.
See also: Stars of the Night Commute, or all posts tagged Ana Bozicevic.