01 Jomo Front Cover 72Dpi

Friends,

Ana Božičević’s Joy of Missing Out is officially… out! To celebrate, Joy of Missing Out is 20% off during August as part of Small Press Distribution’s Handpicked series. Use code HANDPICKED for 20% off discount. Many thanks to everyone at SPD.

Three Birds, LLC books were also on the Small Press Distribution Bestseller list for July, including Tommy Pico's IRL as the #1 Bestseller. Congrats to Lauren Hunter (Human Achievements), Ana Božičević (Joy of Missing Out), and Tommy Pico (IRL), brilliant books by brilliant poets.

JOY OF MISSING OUT is starlite verse on death and independence for the dreamers, dropouts, rebels and the neuroatypical. A confession and sublimation of breakdowns personal and systemic, JOMO paints a playful and unflinching portrait of the ups and downs of psychological struggle, city survival, and queer romance. Simultaneously it deploys online slang and high lyrical registers, morphs the sad girl into Baba Yaga, drops truth bombs on art and politics, and puts the sin into sincerity. Even as it engineers the death of its speaker, JOMO is a paradoxically joyous litany of her endurance and a boost-plea to stay in a messed-up world and say it out loud. This anthem is best read at night or dawn when no one's around for a Like or a kiss.

Ana Božičević invents a new language of 21st century displacement: a displacement that occurs not just in space and in time but in heart, vision and mind. The poems in Joy of Missing Out range from Croatian farm fields and embroidered dresses to life spent online, emoji, chain stores and drugs. Her casual poems are formidably informed and, also, great.

Chris Kraus

Auto-erotic (sunlit) pool life + "the funny softness at the deep end of the field" = Joy of Missing Out. Mid-ocean, is that sound of civilians being murdered, or is it Julie Andrews exclaiming in B minor on an Alpine piste? (Or meadow.) This book is full of switches. Pull the wrong one and there's no Europe. To put it another way, are there continents, cities and countrysides that, having left them, a person might never see again? Twenty-first Century 101: "Stupid pleasures" substitute in their entirety for a very real glacier, etc. I have loved Božičević's poetry for a long time, and it was a glamorous treat for me to be with it again. The extreme poetry that will never, precisely, return.

Bhanu Kapil

from Joy of Missing Out

LOL

Life is lol
Love is lol
Pain is lol
The wind is lol
Cats are lol
Dreams are lol
You are awake
When all is lol

            —Ana Božičević

Love,

The Birds