Ana Božiĉević, NEW LIFE

 

 

5 THINGS AT 40

You are not crazy, it’s the patriarchy
You’re not a loser, it’s the capitalism
You are not old, time’s not really a thing
You’re not alone, I’m here
You’re made of stars, that’s fucking cool

The latest from New York-based “poet, translator, teacher, and occasional singer” Ana Božiĉević, NEW LIFE (Wave Books, 2023), a curious assemblage of lyric first-person studies. Božiĉević’s poems appear as sketches of accumulated phrases that cluster together to form thoughts, narrative and sentences; poems that write the heart from the floor’s foundation, providing narrative substance before slipping into a kind of abstract. “If wishes were horses I would have no horse.” she writes, to open the poem “PSYCHOMAGIC,” “I opened my pussy and a crow flew in. / My heart is a dog sleeping / On our love’s grave. / Yeah I’ve been keeping my / Heart open for you like an elevator / With my bare hands, and now / It’s closing as fast as / The escape hatch / In the sci-fi movie. At the speed / Of a casket lid.” With precise language, she writes a clarity from within and around her particular temporal and cultural moment, offering songs of experience and passionate resolve that hold firm in both their thinking, as well as a curiosity. These are smart and articulate poems. As the poem “LONG LINES” opens: “Looked around your life & / Found no place to sit / So I’ve just been standing / This whole time / And every time I look in / Like that I see / A different color room / Full of beautiful strangers [.]”