The Cloud Notebook

by Ada Smailbegovic

Selected by Tracie Morris in our 2020 Open Call for First Books. Ada Smailbegović's debut collection, The Cloud Notebook , is a long poem that unfolds from the narrative instability and fracturing that occurs from experiences of forced displacement and war, and from configurations of gender and power. Rendering spaces of waiting, suspension, and a kind of fractal recurrence in which the fragment is held, revisited, and re-performed in memory, Smailbegovi? explores how languages and objects come to compose worlds, as well as to carry traces of dislocated and disappearing worlds. The poem assumes what Sara Ahmed refers to as a "migrant orientation" as a continuous problematic of narration or representation. Deftly dissolving the seam between language and sensation, material and thought, The Cloud Notebook is at once playful, probing, elegiac, humorous, and ceaselessly, spellbindingly metamorphic. " The Cloud Notebook is like an impressionist painting, like the punctum detail of a collage. It's a smart, soulful, traumatized and elegant collection."--Tracie Morris "I did not want this book to end. Like a great work of science fiction, The Cloud Notebook asks us to reimagine perception, using the study of matter as an antidote to contemporary ideology. Smailbegović takes influence from memories of childhood, spiritual practice, conceptualism, botany, alchemy, and house parties--yielding a series of accessible philosophies of rescue, dreaming, guessing, worship, description, hosting, mending. An intensely trained and liberatory vision is here, alive with us today, reminding one of Julia Kristeva's call for a 'signifying space,' a corporeal thinking in love with its own desire."--Lucy Ives "A duck is kidnapped from a park and placed on a sofa only to show up on the sofa next door. A speaker wonders in wartime whether to feed the zoo lions or let them free. Someone points out that you can hear the sound of the ocean, but not of individual waves. Ada Smailbegović's work of deep relational concern allows me to dwell in 'joining occasions,' unfolding them with such delicacy that I can relinquish knowing if I am in the world or in a drawing of a world, in a dream or in a life, a war or a sentence where words regarding war touch. If reality occurs in a notebook of passing clouds, we see the traces smudge between the pages -- till the pluralizing realities bleed and mark us at all the edges."--Eleni Sikelianos Poetry.

200 pages, Paperback

Published March 20, 2023

Reviews

[Jane Freiman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that’s a gift

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Consider the edges of reality. And not in an attenuating way. Consider an art that, occupying that edge, is both reminder that there can be an edge, and account of reality not really existing with edges. So the poet points to things or creates things that call attention to the edge. Maybe you, Smailbegović’s reader, don’t see it as an edge. But you can see the possible unreality at that “edge.” Like what if the poet struck up a tent at the edge, and what if the tent (an object the poet has a lot of conceptual fun with in the book’s opening) were to take on different forms. Sometimes just call-the-viewer's-attention-to-that-spot form. And sometimes surreal forms that couldn’t possibly exist, but they can be written about. And that writing has put them on record.

It’s like Smailbegović has set up an outpost at reality’s edge. And, as the book moves away from just tents, it sees edges everywhere. They can be the attenuating details that sharpen someone’s sight of the world, incidental observations, or remarkably crafted juxtapositions, where two things wouldn’t be normally included with what people think of reality. Like maybe recipes collected during the siege of Sarajevo. Of course, they exist. But it’s surprising when you realize they exist. And though the particularity of these “edges” (my word) could be anywhere, Smailbegović might position them in abstract space, or it might feel like an actual location, like you’re in the tent with her. Or you’re observing the garbage on a certain street. Or the city wildlife at the edge of a river. And sometimes it just feels like a space. A queer space—an idea she proposes with her epigraph. And it’s appealing to think this is part of her poetic agenda. Because the way she handles these art objects (the tents, the various details that appear more artistic than mere detail, or that the poetry remarks on the value of any detail if it’s noticed right) feels unreal, special, and familiar. And considering this poetry through an intentionally queer lens offers an art of queerness that feels new and helpful for thinking about queerness. I think the boldest move in Smailbegović book involves the edge proposing art, imagination, and writing as perforations existing at the edge of reality.

Or perhaps they’re performances of reality. Or a performative reality experienced in the poet’s imagination. Smailbegović makes reference to performance throughout the book. Most significant for me is the middle section posing as the book’s nominal “Cloud Notebook”— a collection of sketches, drawings, impressions jotted in the heat of the moment. The book’s reproduction of what is most likely a physical notebook the poet carried with her, and its juxtaposition to the prose-ish poem that makes up the conventionally printed pages speaks to a layered and involved comment on performance. How cream-colored would be an authentic rendition of “notebook” pages. How verse in prose form could be distillations of her cloud notebook in “poetic” form. How many performances should we count? There is the writer keeping a notebook that captures raw moments. I imagine the person on a park bench, the notebook in her lap, the performed withdrawal from the world. Then there is the performance in the more conventionally presented poems, where those moments she has explicitly written about in her “Cloud Notebook” are passed through the poet’s mind into poetic language. Is this performance more like a performed state of mind? Is the performance Smailbegović’s lyric virtuosity? A mimetic experience of expansive seeing?