Say Fire

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

In a pocket, Asotić 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, Asotić 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."An intimate and visceral collection. [Say Fire] is a collection that lives in the body. A fire that starts from the very core of a being. A staggering achievement." —Pierce Alquist, Book Riot

"Cinematic in its visual intensity . . . Say Fire blazes . . . hot with the intensity of unacknowledged grievance, radiant with the light of its own searing historiography." —Preposition

“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.” —Denis Ferhatović, Hopscotch Translation

"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." —Rhian Sasseen

"The tender depiction of interior space that runs through Say Fire is like a refuge from history." —Susan Stewart

"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

“Rich and multi-dimensional . . . Asotić’s 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 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

"In Say Fire, Selma Asotić’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, Asotić writes: I think of you/ in as many ways as the rain 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 CohenA Sarajevo-born, bilingual writer, Selma Asotić 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 Štefica Cvek Prize in 2023.