A Review of Say Fire by Selma Asotić
(Archipelago Books, 2025)
by Jonathan Chan
From the vantage point of 2026, the memory of the Bosnian War can seem faint, like a spectre. Breaking out in 1992 in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the war began in the aftermath of the referendum on the independence of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Objections from Bosnian Serbs and their political representatives led to their mobilising forces from Yugoslav Army units in Bosnia, later restructured as the Army of Republika Srpska. This resulted in bitter conflict between the Army of Republika Srpska and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was supported by the Croatian Defence Council.
The war was the only incident in Europe to have been recognised as a genocide since World War II, with Serb forces killing over 8,000 Bosniak males in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. The siege of Sarajevo has also been seen as emblematic of the war, alongside instances of extreme violence such as the indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns and systematic mass rape. The conclusion of violence, with the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995, saw the formation and international recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with Republika Srpska as one of its constituent entities. Today, Eastern Europe is the front of a new war, with the invasion of Ukraine by an unabashedly revisionist Russia and the slow grind of protracted conflict, while the world bears witness to genocide once again, with the continued bombardments and cruelty inflicted by Israel on Gaza.
Selma Asotić’s collection Say Fire underscores the perpetuity of wartime memory, of scars and trauma. Asotić was born in Sarajevo but is now based in the United States, pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst after finishing undergraduate studies at the University of Sarajevo and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. It is Asotic’s debut in English, though her debut in Bosnian Reci Vatra (2022) was well-received, evidenced by its being awarded the 2023 Štefica Cvek award, which honours feminist and queer literature published in the Yugoslav region. Having grown up amidst the war, Asotić is part of a generation of Bosnians who have been marred by its violence, a generation coming of age with such memories still visceral and fresh. Unlike the descendants of other wars, such as those in Vietnam or Palestine, it can be tempting to assert that the children of the Yugoslav Wars have perhaps had less presence in the popular literary imagination, whether in the United States or elsewhere. Say Fire is an assertion against this in its presentation of the continuing legacy of the Bosnian War, in particular and the Yugoslav Wars more broadly.
Say Fire, which is self-translated, reflects Asotić’s fluency across two contexts, particularly given her transition from writing in Bosnian to English upon her arrival in the United States. It is the exilic position from which the book begins in the poem ‘Landscape with footprints in ash’:
You must leave for the story to begin
is what fairytales taught me.
I left. My ghosts
now trail behind and weep. I try to comfort them.
The exile is not an unfamiliar figure in the realm of a diasporic poetics, nor is the United States an unfamiliar destination for the exile, especially if one is a poet or an intellectual. The sense of grief, or haunting from the old country figures as well, especially with a provenance of recent war. The speaker declares, ‘When I’m alone in the room / all catastrophes are easily traceable’, solitude surfacing a discernible memory of devastation. The speaker mulls over how if they were to die, ‘no one will finish what I set out to say’. A ‘misery’ with no destination. The poem contains the sensibility of an ars poetica. It concludes:
In heat,
things expand. So do minutes.
Fire swallows trees, entire forests.
At some point, there won’t be anything
left to burn. Fire
has no future. What a relief
for the fire.
landscape with footprints
The poem underscores the centrality of the image of fire in the collection, associated with devastation, dereliction, incineration. The forest fire, a familiar sight of disaster in both America and Bosnia, leaves in its wake only detritus and ash. The fire that creates expansion and the dilation of time is bereft of the anxiety of a temporal awareness. The image of ‘footprints’ suggests a sense of survival, or perpetuity, after destruction, the framing of a winding grief through the collection.
There are perhaps four central themes that are braided in Say Fire, through which this grief pulses and winds. It is not a self-pitying or indulgent grief – Asotić has stated in interviews her desire to write against the caricature of a token Eastern European poet fleeing disaster. Rather, hers are poems that ostensibly seek to unsettle and challenge. Central to Asotić’s endeavour of creating a poetry not requiring clear explanation are these four themes: poems centred around the speaker’s experiences of queerness, the speaker’s uncle and father, poems each titled ‘No one writes home’, and poems that locate the memory of war in domestic settings, past and present, especially in relation to America. Their sum is a portrait of life after war, traversing distance and language, from the Bosnian in which Asotić began writing into the English which she has chosen to write in now.
Asotić has spoken of how writing in English provided a new latitude to explore different topics in her poetry and to explore parts of her identity she had not realised existed. One is led to believe that queerness may be one such element, perhaps lacking in articulated forms in Bosnian relative to English, and even stifled by the social conservatism of Bosnia and Herzegovina, dominated by Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic communities, as well as shifts in recent years toward official recognition of homophobia as a form of discrimination. Asotić does not foreground any sense of a relative backwardness or anger. Rather, her poems celebrate the encounter with spaces by which there is a greater sense of permission accorded to one’s queerness. This is evident in the poem ‘First time in the only lesbian bar in my town’, which ends:
There is a sense of discovery, as well as openness, that is coupled with the speaker’s hunger for physical intimacy. The neologistic verb ‘unsun’ suggests the refusal of sunlight, or warmth, the death of stars, tying back to the description of the bar as a ‘Holy black hole in the wall’. The turn to the vault, to the ‘prairied’ body, suggests not a restoration to a kind of lushness or wholeness. The proximity to the meeting of an inexpressible want, of a full acceptance, compels the vulnerability of ‘shaking’.
There is a similar tenderness and reckoning in the poems ‘Coming out’ and ‘Aubade with a 104° fever’. The former revisits, yet subverts, the narrative of coming out to a mother who asks, ‘if I’m one of them’. Poetry is the language that sometimes requires ‘to lie to tell the truth’, where ‘Words […] are like teeth’. Attempts to present the burgeoning of queer desire through the repetition of ‘the body’ and ‘the city’, and ‘the earthquake’ give way to the image of words as ‘Minuscule knives’. If there is weakness to some of these poems, it could be a tendency to return to a banality of sentiment or the illogic of the image – ‘All we need to do is withstand this morning, as it waves at us with hands / that know how to hold something beautiful / without bitterness’ concludes ‘Aubade with a 104° fever’. ‘I treat my body to an entry wound / in which to collapse’ suggests ‘Monologue for a first date’. The love poem, beholden to a plenitude, or surfeit, of explorations and expressions, finds its challenges again in new compositions.
In Asotić’s poems dwelling on the ramifications of war, whether through her father or uncle conscripted to fight, I sense in myself a subconscious, totalising tendency, as if to cast onto Asotić the burden of representing a nation, or a diaspora. It senses the seeming burden of representation, the same tendency that has often cast writers of the Global South, or other minor literatures, as informants or ethnographers, tasked with providing an interlocutory view into a distant world of difficulty. To do so can create a kind of reductionism, or essentialism. And yet, some of these concepts are important hermeneutic approaches to Asotić’s poems, such as in ‘Ode to my nation’, describing:
Everything that does not love me
is you, invigilator, blister
on my soul, my sleepless flight,
fight me or uproot
from my blood, you neverending
graveyard of clocks,
every sun in you dripping rust
into my irises, lip-hasp,
lullabied sear
There is a sense of alienation, rejection, and betrayal from the notion of the nation. A litany of images illustrates struggle, contention, expulsion, and physical harm. Yet, the wounds sustained by the soul of the speaker are emotional, contrasting with the physical scars sustained by the speaker’s male relatives.
The poem ‘My father’s skin looks like the surface of the moon’ speaks to the cratering of the skin after war. The poem’s first lines are elegant yet devastating:
They told you shrapnel made men
celestial, that’s why you joined
the army
The father, years after the war, now stands ‘sentinel at the edge of our sleep, guarding / against the peacethieves’. The father has retreated into the silence, as ‘you and I mummify / waiting for the rains to pass’, the speaker yearning to ‘tie / my hair to the hooves of your voice’ if he is to speak. The curiosity of having seen the ‘moles’ in the garden or ‘bird nest / under the eaves’ was subsumed only by the curiosity of ‘how many / you captured. How many did you kill?’
Or for the speaker’s uncle, what pervades is the slipperiness, the unreliability of the speaker’s memory. The narrative of the speaker’s uncle unfolds in prose poems, each segment of a longer poem called ‘Uncle’. The first is a memory of the uncle leaving from a hallway, ‘pineapple grenade hanging by the trigger’ on hooks with a hat and coat. In the second, he walks across a courtyard to a workshop, reaching behind a toolbox to ‘grip the solid body’, which ‘looks like a sleeping sparrow’. The uncle is a ‘blue-eyed boy’ in the third segment, seeing his mother who ‘feeds lines to faltering actors drunk on šljivovica’ at ‘provincial theatre houses’, before the poem’s prolepsis, 55 years later, to the uncle trying to retain a memory of his mother’s face. The uncle is still the ‘blue-eyed boy’ in the fourth section, circumcised after infancy by a barber, ‘shrieking like a piglet’. In the same section, later in that same year, the boy is delayed in his return home because of ‘a vague urgency rising in his stomach’, the utterance of a request: ‘please give me back my father’. In the final section, a newspaper headline: ‘ANOTHER WAR VETERAN BLOWS HIMSELF UP.’ The uncle has become subject to the politics of the state, opposition leaders claiming that ‘heroes’ have been let down. The speaker’s brother screams at a journalist to use his initials as ‘his mother doesn’t know yet’. What binds each portion of the narrative is the refrain: ‘That’s not how it happened’. The unreliability of memory becomes not just a sketch of the parsed history of an uncle’s conscription and upbringing, but a self-suspicion toward a culmination in suicide.
These poems, expressing the legacy of the Bosnian War through the unreliability of domestic memory, contrast heavily against the ways the speaker encounters the war in the American imaginary. Allow me to qualify what I mean through two poems: ‘Lessons from a war’, and ‘they descend upon us’. They are consecutive in the collection. The first begins ‘it never ends’, describing a cycle of leader figures: ‘the cleric’, ‘thief’, ‘chief commander’, ‘intellectual’, then eventually, in capitulation to pressure to integrate into the global economy, ‘the investor’. The speaker then outlines various experiences: a dream of ‘the tip of a gun at your nape’, the names that ‘are now bleeding on CNN’s chyron’, and the screen showing ‘a man giving his child / to a soldier’. Different encounters activate different memories of conflict and fragmentation. The ‘american cop’ at the ‘border crossing’ asking ‘where are you from’ leads to the speaker ‘[pointing] to everywhere that is disappearing’. Waiting at the cash register induces the memory of ‘the chocolate bars in the fist of an UNPROFOR peacekeeper’. There is at once both proximity and distance – the relentless news cycle pioneered by platforms like CNN in the 1990s, allowing for constant media coverage of the wars in the Balkans, creates a feeling of images of war entering domestic space. The candy that was a luxury for children in war zones is common in American grocery stores. Asotić registers her objection to the way that the war she experienced has been abstracted in the lexicon of American policy and societal analysis. She scoffs at the ‘op-ed by a concerned intellectual: we must stop the balkanization of america’. Or again, at the ‘new yorker / staff writer’ who tweets: ‘compassion is not the first thing that comes to mind / when one thinks of the balkans.’ Just as the speaker contains the scars of living through war, so too does she chafe against its intrusions into the American consciousness through its reduction to metaphor or faint impression. There is a sense of rage that simmers – perhaps the dehumanisation implicit in taking from distant conflicts vocabulary for political analysis, or the ability to forget about the wounds of war at all.
This is explored in greater depth in ‘they descend upon us’, with the speaker grappling with the condescension of the ‘American PhDs’ who arrive to ‘investigate this part of the world so often plagued by bursts of inter-ethnic violence.’ Call it an imperial, or colonial, gaze, the American university, flushed with resources, is able to dispatch curious graduate students to build their academic careers from analysis or abstractions of countries and communities from afar, with knowledge ultimately concentrated in the university once again. The sense of smugness is embodied in the figure of ‘Nick from Connecticut’, a ‘peace studies graduate’, deployed to ‘spread common sense’ wherever there is a war. A ‘few more genocides and he’ll join the tenure track,’ the poem quips. The subjectivity shifts to the communities of former warzones, becoming Nick’s ‘local informants’, recipients of ‘compassion dripping from your face onto the floor’, stained by his ‘sorry so sorry’. The speaker describes how it is ‘your mother’s marble kitchen top we covet’, the casual wealth not forfeited in the pursuit of academic excellence. The speaker even lambasts Nick’s dissertation acknowledgements, lampooning the ‘sincere gratitude to survivors whose stories testify to the need for restorative justice and transversal reconciliation in the subliminal space of post-conflict contexts.’ Italics become the poem’s code for sardonicism. The poem concludes with the ‘we’, ostensibly a Bosnian we, salivating at the prospect of ‘tying you to a chair, bashing in your head, sweet, little Nick from Connecticut’. There is a sense of cathartic violence at play, in having endured the indignities of an imperial compassion, of the instrumentalisation of a traumatised community in service of an individual’s career advancement.
This is juxtaposed against the collection’s other serious engagement with the United States, a reverse anthropology in the sequence of poems titled ‘No one writes home’. Here, the poems foreground the speaker’s experience of having left Bosnia for the United States. There are four interspersed throughout the collection, the first in which the speaker comments:
I try on hand-me-down cities,
oversized and worn through by the solitude of others.
Monuments go by. Fields
deep in thought.
[…]
The sky stays the same,
darling and handsome. A continent
lullabies itself into water.
I imagine you on the other side,
in the same room where I tried to read
your waverings in the ictus of smoke.
Mother, what comes next
are the saints who never come.
Images of passing landscapes and urban locales, the invocation of ‘continents’ and separation across bodies of water, and the persistence of a memory of attempted domestic legibility are not uncommon to the migratory imagination. The passive voice implies some surrender of agency, as the speaker registers experiences of mismatch and misunderstanding, yet defaulting to the consistency of the ‘sky’. Other poems in the sequence seem to feature a similar resistance to indulging an epistolary impulse. In the third poem, the speaker describes going ‘down to the coast to watch a wave / retract its gesture’, commenting on how a wave ‘erases nothing but its own longing’. There is a sense of perpetual motion common to the exile, of the speaker ruminating over how ‘If’ they ‘ever arrive’, or ‘forget’, they might become ‘a floating thing. / With love,’ the conclusion of the poem on a comma implying this sense of indeterminacy.
The second poem of the sequence is perhaps the crux of the entire collection, not only in its focus on the speaker’s mother, nor in its engagement with an experience between Bosnia and the United States, but also in its inclusion of the collection’s title. It features the postscript ‘Sarajevo-New York, 2019’. Presented in couplets, the speaker resists the compulsion toward banality in a letter, bypassing small talk, imagining how ‘cities are orchestras / of hammers out of sync’, or juxtaposing the inevitability of ‘weeping’ against ‘dust still trembling’ with ‘laughter’. The speaker intones:
Instead of comfort
let me say fire.
Instead of forgive
Let me say fire. Instead of October
let me say light is the color of a bullet. Look
at the air, mother. The air is full of it.
The poem retains an unabashed focus on a sense of corporeality and viscerality. It leans toward a tendency seen in contemporary poetry that tends to circulate on social media, juxtaposing flashes of violence and crises and daily ordinary joys and sorrows, a tendency I have also been wont to entertain, yet this does not feel entirely unearned in Asotić’s poem. It coheres with Asotić’s aspiration toward provocation, rather than seeking sympathy. To ‘say fire’ rather than to ‘comfort’, or ‘to forgive’, to contemplate on how light is the ‘color of a bullet’, perhaps referring to how an auburn or golden glaze of light looks like the casing of a bullet, is to deliberately unsettle even a momentary encounter with beauty.
At its strongest, Say Fire at once contains and articulates the wounds of war while confronting the contradictions present for the Bosnian migrant to the United States, reflecting on the past interventions and ongoing imaginings of the Bosnian War through its hegemonic cultural imagination. In an interview, Asotić has commented how she and her friends in Bosnia ‘feel like a post-apocalyptic people’, which has provided an ‘appreciation of how fragile life is’. This fragility is informed by the way the body contains the lingering traumas induced by devastation, the way one can never part entirely from a consciousness of violence past and violence present. The memory of war and genocide is layered over the wars and genocides that are ongoing, as well as the commonplace violence that exists in everyday America today. It would be apt to embrace the experience of being unsettled by the collection’s poetry.
A 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.
Jonathan Chan is a writer, editor, and translator of poems and essays. His first collection of poems, going home (Landmark, 2022), was a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2024. His second collection is bright sorrow (Landmark, 2025). His forthcoming collection azalea dialogues (Gasher Press, 2027) received the 2025 Gasher Two Languages Prize. He serves as Managing Editor of the poetry archive poetry.sg. His reviews and essays have been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, SUSPECT, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Soapberry Review, The Rumpus, and The Foundationalist. Educated at Cambridge and Yale, he was born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother. He was raised in Singapore, where he currently lives.