What do you think?
Rate this book
Say Fire
Bosnian poet Selma Asotić’s fearless debut on memory and resistance
Wounded bodies are at the heart of Say Fire. Bodies cringe and crouch (years after the war) as fireworks shoot through the sky, bodies fail from cancer in peacetime, bodies collapse into local headlines and reports. The body remembers but seems to learn nothing, Selma Asotić says, her own body mummified by shadowed histories and doubt. With precise lyrical grace, Asotić winds us past these fragments, these questions, into rooms where lovers lie “gorged on light,” their bodies alive and blossoming. A hand on the small of the back might dissolve all rage – all fear – conviction that one has survived.
Born in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asotić writes in a feverish present tense, tracing her family history in close lyric and careful reportage. “That’s how/ every history begins./ Something bursts, and everyone clutches their chests to see/ if it is they who burst.” Leaning into her own recursions, hesitations, and doubt, Asotić alchemizes language into something corporeal. With lines that conjure the chimeric turns of Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Marina Tsvetaeva, Asotić illumines a life lived in the wake of war – the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves retracting their gestures.
Wounded bodies are at the heart of Say Fire. Bodies cringe and crouch (years after the war) as fireworks shoot through the sky, bodies fail from cancer in peacetime, bodies collapse into local headlines and reports. The body remembers but seems to learn nothing, Selma Asotić says, her own body mummified by shadowed histories and doubt. With precise lyrical grace, Asotić winds us past these fragments, these questions, into rooms where lovers lie “gorged on light,” their bodies alive and blossoming. A hand on the small of the back might dissolve all rage – all fear – conviction that one has survived.
Born in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asotić writes in a feverish present tense, tracing her family history in close lyric and careful reportage. “That’s how/ every history begins./ Something bursts, and everyone clutches their chests to see/ if it is they who burst.” Leaning into her own recursions, hesitations, and doubt, Asotić alchemizes language into something corporeal. With lines that conjure the chimeric turns of Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Marina Tsvetaeva, Asotić illumines a life lived in the wake of war – the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves retracting their gestures.
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
Published October 14, 2025
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 1, 2026
I should premise this by saying I know the author personally and am definitely biased. But as someone who hasn’t read poetry in years, the sparse words in these 50 pages blew me away. Asotić mixes themes of war, memory/trauma, body, family, queerness/desire, and even the seasons and the land in such a brilliant way I can’t even articulate. This is not just a collection of poems but a consistent, albeit ‘balkanized’ (more on that later) story with an insistent direction.
Say Fire starts off harsh: “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.” I’ve been mulling these lines over in my head for the last few days and I’m not sure why but they won’t leave. You must leave for the story to begin, maybe there’s no other choice, but what follows is ghosts and hauntings and things you can’t escape from. The story then begins with a beginning.
I wrote a novel a bit over a year ago (publishing TBD), one I’m only somewhat happy with, and the longer I sit with these pages in Say Fire, the more I feel like the piece I had actually wanted to create was precisely what Asotić has crafted here. Two refrains jump out from Say Fire: “That’s not how it happened.” and “The body remembers, but learns nothing.” Who knows how it happened? Not me, not you, not Asotić, not the people who were there when it happened, whatever divine truth there was in centuries past has been fragmented, split up, balkanized. And what is there to learn from the score the body keeps? Asotić hits the nail on the head with the experience of trauma and the process of ‘healing’, whatever that means: she writes that “It’s hard convincing your own body it has survived.” This text especially reminds me of Daša Drndić’s novel Trieste (another writer on atrocities in the Balkans), who wrote that “despite the fact that history stubbornly repeats itself, we are bad learners,” and that “History has no need to return, History is in our marrow.” It does live in our marrow, in our bodies, history is the score the body keeps, and yet. Where do we go from there? Say Fire seems to be about that question but does not pretend at an answer.
Despite everything, we can’t help but turn back. Say Fire begins with a beginning and ends with a return: “I’m running back to you mother, all the time.” That longing for an Eden, a prelapsarian wholeness, a pre-birth unity, pre-alienation, some cosmic One to revert back to. This has been written at length by plenty of authors, sure, but one quote really stuck with me, attesting to the failure of the world to respond to this universal need: “There, there now, no one says.” And no one says it; and when people do say it it falls flat, sounds inauthentic, at best mimetic of a parental comforting. In the end we run back to mother, who is constantly vanishing. And father is a ghost that haunts.
As a fellow queer Balkan, I can’t help but feel profoundly connected to this text. Granted, I’m not Bosnian but Slovene by background (Slovenia being relatively unaffected by the ‘conflicts’), and was not even alive for any of the atrocities of the Bosnian genocide. I won’t pretend to know this experience by any means. But still I feel that these memories live within me in some distorted form, maybe passed down intergenerationally, and there is a searing pain behind this text that comes out in many forms—yearning, anger, scorn, regret, despair, hope—that spoke to me on a really fundamental level, in no small part thanks to Asotić’s enchanting prose and linguistic iron grip on these aspects of the human condition.
I really really really hate the term ‘balkanization.’ I always have, and when you read about Nick from Connecticut on page 36, you’ll get why. It is a term that seems to essentialize arbitrary violence as part of the Balkan condition; it carries unbelievable condescension and reduces the entirety of the Balkans—their complex and interwoven multilingual/multicultural histories, their passions and loves and despairs and dreams and compassions—into a singular concept. Even worse when it’s used metaphorically to describe other places: oh no, with present-day levels of polarization, America is risking balkanization! Heaven forbid we turn into warring savages like those Balkan brutes! But Asotić, while treating this term with the scorn it well deserves, brings a nuance to it as well. Balkanization, for better or worse, has become a kind of reality, an imposed narrative perhaps but one that has become part of the Balkan condition anyway. And it seeps into ourselves, internally split up and warring. “Now I live as a wayward storm, thoroughly balkanized.” I have my own reasons for resonating so strongly with this, but it’s such a complex and fascinating move, almost reclaiming in balkanization a form of identity, not holding it as superior but also not abjecting it as some fearful Other (“we must stop the balkanization of america!”).
I’ve always been proud to be Balkan (most Slovenes hate considering themselves Balkan, seeing that as a dirty term for ‘those uncivilized folks down south’) but this has also made me think of what it means to be balkanized, to live with the embodied histories of war, of genocide, of fragmentation, of trauma, of memory we can’t learn from. What it means to live on, to love, to hope, to dream with these ghosts and these cuts in our bodies. Asotić deconstructs these mythologies of war without simply despairing over the broken condition of the Balkans today. A lasting thought from this that even I’m not sure about: shrapnel doesn’t make man celestial, but maybe it’s part of what makes man human.
This is an outstanding read, one you can come back to a million times over, and even if you're not a queer Balkan comparative literature student, this book is sure to change you in some way you can't predict.
Say Fire starts off harsh: “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.” I’ve been mulling these lines over in my head for the last few days and I’m not sure why but they won’t leave. You must leave for the story to begin, maybe there’s no other choice, but what follows is ghosts and hauntings and things you can’t escape from. The story then begins with a beginning.
I wrote a novel a bit over a year ago (publishing TBD), one I’m only somewhat happy with, and the longer I sit with these pages in Say Fire, the more I feel like the piece I had actually wanted to create was precisely what Asotić has crafted here. Two refrains jump out from Say Fire: “That’s not how it happened.” and “The body remembers, but learns nothing.” Who knows how it happened? Not me, not you, not Asotić, not the people who were there when it happened, whatever divine truth there was in centuries past has been fragmented, split up, balkanized. And what is there to learn from the score the body keeps? Asotić hits the nail on the head with the experience of trauma and the process of ‘healing’, whatever that means: she writes that “It’s hard convincing your own body it has survived.” This text especially reminds me of Daša Drndić’s novel Trieste (another writer on atrocities in the Balkans), who wrote that “despite the fact that history stubbornly repeats itself, we are bad learners,” and that “History has no need to return, History is in our marrow.” It does live in our marrow, in our bodies, history is the score the body keeps, and yet. Where do we go from there? Say Fire seems to be about that question but does not pretend at an answer.
Despite everything, we can’t help but turn back. Say Fire begins with a beginning and ends with a return: “I’m running back to you mother, all the time.” That longing for an Eden, a prelapsarian wholeness, a pre-birth unity, pre-alienation, some cosmic One to revert back to. This has been written at length by plenty of authors, sure, but one quote really stuck with me, attesting to the failure of the world to respond to this universal need: “There, there now, no one says.” And no one says it; and when people do say it it falls flat, sounds inauthentic, at best mimetic of a parental comforting. In the end we run back to mother, who is constantly vanishing. And father is a ghost that haunts.
As a fellow queer Balkan, I can’t help but feel profoundly connected to this text. Granted, I’m not Bosnian but Slovene by background (Slovenia being relatively unaffected by the ‘conflicts’), and was not even alive for any of the atrocities of the Bosnian genocide. I won’t pretend to know this experience by any means. But still I feel that these memories live within me in some distorted form, maybe passed down intergenerationally, and there is a searing pain behind this text that comes out in many forms—yearning, anger, scorn, regret, despair, hope—that spoke to me on a really fundamental level, in no small part thanks to Asotić’s enchanting prose and linguistic iron grip on these aspects of the human condition.
I really really really hate the term ‘balkanization.’ I always have, and when you read about Nick from Connecticut on page 36, you’ll get why. It is a term that seems to essentialize arbitrary violence as part of the Balkan condition; it carries unbelievable condescension and reduces the entirety of the Balkans—their complex and interwoven multilingual/multicultural histories, their passions and loves and despairs and dreams and compassions—into a singular concept. Even worse when it’s used metaphorically to describe other places: oh no, with present-day levels of polarization, America is risking balkanization! Heaven forbid we turn into warring savages like those Balkan brutes! But Asotić, while treating this term with the scorn it well deserves, brings a nuance to it as well. Balkanization, for better or worse, has become a kind of reality, an imposed narrative perhaps but one that has become part of the Balkan condition anyway. And it seeps into ourselves, internally split up and warring. “Now I live as a wayward storm, thoroughly balkanized.” I have my own reasons for resonating so strongly with this, but it’s such a complex and fascinating move, almost reclaiming in balkanization a form of identity, not holding it as superior but also not abjecting it as some fearful Other (“we must stop the balkanization of america!”).
I’ve always been proud to be Balkan (most Slovenes hate considering themselves Balkan, seeing that as a dirty term for ‘those uncivilized folks down south’) but this has also made me think of what it means to be balkanized, to live with the embodied histories of war, of genocide, of fragmentation, of trauma, of memory we can’t learn from. What it means to live on, to love, to hope, to dream with these ghosts and these cuts in our bodies. Asotić deconstructs these mythologies of war without simply despairing over the broken condition of the Balkans today. A lasting thought from this that even I’m not sure about: shrapnel doesn’t make man celestial, but maybe it’s part of what makes man human.
This is an outstanding read, one you can come back to a million times over, and even if you're not a queer Balkan comparative literature student, this book is sure to change you in some way you can't predict.
December 4, 2025
The word just find themselves. They touched me and they will stay with me for a while I think.
What more can you ask for?
there are some good lines, some magnificent and imaginative ones and some that just carry themselves.
“God is great, if you are kneeling.“
This one is just good, so good at the end of the poem where it appears.
“These days a thorn bush hums in my throat”
“Within you, generations of betrayed smiles now rise in riot -“
These are just beautiful.
“From a windows someone tossed out forest of palms. Daylight winces.
Someone is now clearing vistas,…”
“Someone then shouts mine,
Sets a suspicious rolling down the road.
Logs in the forest bristle with moss.”
“Like a matchstick I contain infinite promise, my head ablaze, a dent in the night. Skilled in cloud-conduct, lazing over cities strewn with gutted years. The industrious hate the look of me, emergencies tug at my sleeve while I preoccupy myself with time stretching in a jar of honey.”
And these, well they just carry themselves. Because ofcourse window fits wincing daylight and palms fit clearing vistas. And a suspicious rolling down the road is a log and suspicion bristles.
What more can you ask for?
there are some good lines, some magnificent and imaginative ones and some that just carry themselves.
“God is great, if you are kneeling.“
This one is just good, so good at the end of the poem where it appears.
“These days a thorn bush hums in my throat”
“Within you, generations of betrayed smiles now rise in riot -“
These are just beautiful.
“From a windows someone tossed out forest of palms. Daylight winces.
Someone is now clearing vistas,…”
“Someone then shouts mine,
Sets a suspicious rolling down the road.
Logs in the forest bristle with moss.”
“Like a matchstick I contain infinite promise, my head ablaze, a dent in the night. Skilled in cloud-conduct, lazing over cities strewn with gutted years. The industrious hate the look of me, emergencies tug at my sleeve while I preoccupy myself with time stretching in a jar of honey.”
And these, well they just carry themselves. Because ofcourse window fits wincing daylight and palms fit clearing vistas. And a suspicious rolling down the road is a log and suspicion bristles.
September 9, 2025
he will never know how fast the shadows lengthen when you try to outrun them
January 6, 2026
monologue for a second date
lessons from a war
questions my mother will never ask
they descend upon us
lessons from a war
questions my mother will never ask
they descend upon us
September 3, 2026
War and grief and family and surrealism and fables intermingle in this incredible poetry collection. Usually when I'm done reading a book, I take it off my desk and place it in my shelves, but this one has remained on my desk because I plan on reading it again soon.
May 14, 2026
"deine verachtung knospt wunderschön & heilig"🌸
Read
May 15, 2026Enjoyed reading this despite how inept i feel at understanding and considering poetry.
December 19, 2025
this collection definitely knocks the wind out of you - so emotionally poignant and raw and really digs into questions of memory, history, diaspora/immigrant living, and sexuality
would recommend for those trying to get more into poetry!
would recommend for those trying to get more into poetry!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews