80 Pages
©2013
Publisher: Birds
Purchase includes: PDF

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Ana Božičević is both a poet's poet and the people's poet. RISE IN THE FALL, her second full-length collection, is a revolutionary book and an ars poetica for the polis in which she excludes nothing. Navigating literary history, gender, sexuality, economics, family and friends, she is at ease employing both the universal political statement and the lyric "I." A Croatian émigré, Božičević approaches the English language with a playful objectivity, bouncing back and forth from the conversational to the grand: "This is the whitest shit / I've ever written" she notes in her half-myth "About Nietzsche." Her critique of our time and place is at once empathetic and crude, tender and grotesque. Lucky for us, "beauty [wins] in all its casual terror and pain."

"This is more the work of an ancient waterfall than a human. One that told stories, broke dishes and wept. Got drunk rode a horse to the city in the moonlight shouting songs. No matter what the radiant, brilliantly unbalanced work of Ana Božičević always feels right. She's a bit of a colossus. It's stuck, it's in motion. It's absurdly enough."—Eileen Myles

Ana Božičević was born in Croatia in 1977, and emigrated to New York when she was nineteen. Her debut book of poems, STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009), was a finalist for the 2010 Lambda Literary Award. She completed her MFA at Hunter College, and is now a PhD Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she helps run the Annual Chapbook Festival, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and the Transculturations Seminar. Ana has read her poetry and taught at Naropa University, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the San Francisco State University Poetry Center, and many other venues nationwide. In Fall 2010, The Feminist Press honored her as one of their 40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism award recipients. Her translation of Zvonko Karanović's Snow on Fire was awarded the PEN American Center/NYSCA grant. The anthology of translations The Day Lady Gaga Died: An Anthology of Newer New York Poets she co-edited with Željko Mitić appeared in Serbia in Fall 2011.