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Stars of the Night Commute
Poetry. "STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams"Annie Finch. "Bozicevic's poetry has everythinga mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound"Noelle Kocot. "How does she do it?"Eileen Myles. "Absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect.... She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial.... She is able to perceive with the eyes of languagethen render with lyrical immediacythe experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream"Franz Wright.
- GenresPoetry
84 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2009
About the author
Ana Bozicevic
17 books85 followersAna Božičević is the author of
Joy of Missing Out
(Birds, LLC, 2017), the Lambda Award-Winning
Rise in the Fall
(Birds, LLC, 2013), and
Stars of the Night Commute
(Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009).
She is also the translator of It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire by Zvonko Karanović (Phoneme Media, 2017), a recipient of the PEN / NYSCA grant.
She is also the translator of It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire by Zvonko Karanović (Phoneme Media, 2017), a recipient of the PEN / NYSCA grant.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 24, 2009
Look for my review of this in Verse!
June 9, 2010
One of my favorite poetry books of the year!
October 27, 2009
Simply read this passage from Bozicevic's book:
"If the sign on the door signals to the passer-by that the store is OPEN, does the other side of the sign tell those inside the store that the world is CLOSED?"
And know that it is well, well worth reading.
"If the sign on the door signals to the passer-by that the store is OPEN, does the other side of the sign tell those inside the store that the world is CLOSED?"
And know that it is well, well worth reading.
June 14, 2010
My review of Ana Bozicevic's Stars of the Night Commute is up at Jacket. One of the best poetry books of 2009, without a doubt. Check it out!
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-bozice...
April 29, 2010
Ms. Bozicevic's first full-length collection does not disappoint. The voice one encounters here is engaging: by turns tender, searching, funny, deep. I look forward to reading more from her.
Want to Read
December 7, 2009Ana's poetry is magical. Everything she writes inspires me in so many ways, and hearing her read is a joy. I can't wait to get my hands on this book.
Read
April 22, 2018"there's a swan in your breathing."
April 23, 2026
Post-modern poetry inevitably feels like so much mud slung at a wall. There's some that sticks, but that's what you get with random chance: sometimes serendipity. Her poems usually dripped down to the bottom of the page where the best lines lay, much like my common complaint of films which ended right where they should have began. I would like to write a series of poems using the final line or two of each of these as the title, but alas, I feel out of joint with poetry.
It's not that I'm jaded, but I am. Eventually it all ends up sounding the same; what on first blush reads as vivacity becomes mulled cud once gnashed a thousandfold. It's like the dead-end of modern art, it either squeaks out into the oblivion of extremes, or it embraces the avant-conservative tenor of Poetry mag.
I've been debating going to a poetry writing workshop on campus in a couple weeks, but my interest in the genre seems to be waning, at least in writing it. I'd much rather wrap my prose in a poetic blanket than struggle against the undertow dragging contemporary poetry into obscurity. That's not to say I'm not a sucker for lost causes, if you've read my reviews you know that. But there seems to be something missing here, as I mentioned in the last review I just wrote. The premoderns had an immediacy, that of seeing the face of God when they wrote, partially because paper was so expensive, and partially because the stakes were much higher: you could actually die for your writings. Today, most people die without anyone ever having read their writings.
Apparently people like Ana Bozicevic, and part of me feels bad for not joining them in shouting her praise. I mostly picked this book up from the library last year because of the cover, a surrealist nightmare by Remedios Varo, and I finally read it this year because it was slim. That's the thing about poetry: it has anorexia nervosa. It has to be short in order to hold our attention, to be re-readable. It also has to be small in order to sell, since publishers as a rule don't publish poetry anymore. When they do, it's more as a semi-superstitious sacrifice to some god long gone without a name.
If I were to be generous, the purpose of post-modern poetry is to name the unnamable, but all too often the author doesn't even know what they're naming, if they're naming anything at all. Sometimes Bozicevic gathers enough dross for an ingot, but like I said they're scattered at the ends of poems: "Because you can't touch cloud. / What you want to say is cloud." I can't help but feel that there's a certain sub-genre of poetry that's good to spark some inspiration and little more. I didn't know what to take from this, as is the case most of the time when I read poetry. And yeah, I know that I always preach the point of poetry being a resistance against easy answers and comfortable linearity, but you can only repeat the exercise so many times before you must question whether it's become masturbatory.
The only poem which really stuck with me was one from the section called "Amy" (!!); the poem, "A Summer's Breeze", gently repeated this theme of stroking another person's arm, seeing their veins as mini mountains on a human-shaped globe, and I really liked the world she built. But the voice veered so wildly between poems I often didn't know what to expect (in an unhelpful way). Some of them aged badly because they were cringey (like the "OPEN"/"CLOSED" one), and one actually accidentally predicted Trump becoming president (back in 2009!).
Perhaps Ana will be canonized in some retroactive orthodoxy, but I can't be bothered to read many more of these. I keep wanting to give contemporary poetry a chance, but ultimately the secular / randomness machine / workshoping model is just another dead end in the long sarcophagus of post-post-post-reactions.
It's not that I'm jaded, but I am. Eventually it all ends up sounding the same; what on first blush reads as vivacity becomes mulled cud once gnashed a thousandfold. It's like the dead-end of modern art, it either squeaks out into the oblivion of extremes, or it embraces the avant-conservative tenor of Poetry mag.
I've been debating going to a poetry writing workshop on campus in a couple weeks, but my interest in the genre seems to be waning, at least in writing it. I'd much rather wrap my prose in a poetic blanket than struggle against the undertow dragging contemporary poetry into obscurity. That's not to say I'm not a sucker for lost causes, if you've read my reviews you know that. But there seems to be something missing here, as I mentioned in the last review I just wrote. The premoderns had an immediacy, that of seeing the face of God when they wrote, partially because paper was so expensive, and partially because the stakes were much higher: you could actually die for your writings. Today, most people die without anyone ever having read their writings.
Apparently people like Ana Bozicevic, and part of me feels bad for not joining them in shouting her praise. I mostly picked this book up from the library last year because of the cover, a surrealist nightmare by Remedios Varo, and I finally read it this year because it was slim. That's the thing about poetry: it has anorexia nervosa. It has to be short in order to hold our attention, to be re-readable. It also has to be small in order to sell, since publishers as a rule don't publish poetry anymore. When they do, it's more as a semi-superstitious sacrifice to some god long gone without a name.
If I were to be generous, the purpose of post-modern poetry is to name the unnamable, but all too often the author doesn't even know what they're naming, if they're naming anything at all. Sometimes Bozicevic gathers enough dross for an ingot, but like I said they're scattered at the ends of poems: "Because you can't touch cloud. / What you want to say is cloud." I can't help but feel that there's a certain sub-genre of poetry that's good to spark some inspiration and little more. I didn't know what to take from this, as is the case most of the time when I read poetry. And yeah, I know that I always preach the point of poetry being a resistance against easy answers and comfortable linearity, but you can only repeat the exercise so many times before you must question whether it's become masturbatory.
The only poem which really stuck with me was one from the section called "Amy" (!!); the poem, "A Summer's Breeze", gently repeated this theme of stroking another person's arm, seeing their veins as mini mountains on a human-shaped globe, and I really liked the world she built. But the voice veered so wildly between poems I often didn't know what to expect (in an unhelpful way). Some of them aged badly because they were cringey (like the "OPEN"/"CLOSED" one), and one actually accidentally predicted Trump becoming president (back in 2009!).
Perhaps Ana will be canonized in some retroactive orthodoxy, but I can't be bothered to read many more of these. I keep wanting to give contemporary poetry a chance, but ultimately the secular / randomness machine / workshoping model is just another dead end in the long sarcophagus of post-post-post-reactions.
September 8, 2010
3.5 stars. It's strange. I liked its novel phrasings, but had a hard time really being absorbed by its world.
October 29, 2013
I'm happy to be introduced to Remedios Varo, painter, on the cover of this book.
February 2, 2016
exciting
commutes
commutes
April 4, 2019
After reading this debut collection, I started talking to myself more. Brightened lines like "leafed through a creased farmer's almanac" and "he still walks the park, in a scarf, / unaware he was made to endure". A personal favorite from this book is the short poem "Sunset Riddle" but all of them royally kicked me in my spinning head.
May 2, 2020
There are a few poems I read a few times over (“Ode to Cotton,” “viii. Document”) but mostly the work is too abstracted for me to latch onto anything as meaningful. The language is often beautiful but I found myself asking “beautiful in service of saying... what?” after almost every poem. It’s like the poetic equivalent of looking at a Mondrian.
August 27, 2020
Love all her poems.
Dig in.
Dig in.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews