Rise in the Fall

Rise in the Fall

Ana Božičević

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 - even nothing. Navigating literary history, gender, sexuality, economics, family, friends and lovers, she is at ease deploying and subverting 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."

What People Are Saying

Anne Waldman

One of our most rambunctious and charismatic poets, Ana Božičević bends our lingual sensibility on a wild worldly trajectory not to be missed.

Eileen Myles

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.

Inside the Book

Category:
Poetry / Art
Binding:
Perfect-bound 80 pp
Dimensions
8.8" x 5.9"
Publication Date:
March 2013
ISBN:
9780982617786

Watch the Trailer

Reviews

Seth Abramson

The Huffington Post

Elisa Gabbert

Lemon Hound

Publisher's Weekly

Publishers Weekly

Carrie Lorig

HTMLGIANT

Laura Carter

Fanzine

From the Book

Children's Lit

	  			

I saw a lake
make it into your dream. It was weeping all along the bedpost.
I never seen a lake act like that


and I saw a bumblebee fall from his
home in the rafters
the hole in his laughter
done him in. Poor that bee.


I'm writing in some kind of vernacular
that's not even my own, just to endear myself to you
am I not endearing?


I'm a fat married girl
and a mushroom cloud
a downright doom boutonniere


blooms behind me all over the lake in your dream but
the bees' bodies keep filtering it out, as well as
the presence of my parents


and my sister's bride's parents


isn't it nice how everyone's married and fat?
I love big cars. I fucking love to stuff them up my cunt.

I feel so much tenderness for you
as you sleep...

The Day Lady Gaga Died

	  			

What is this day: is it like a rainbow
an abstract I kinda grasp, is it a house with the white streamers on it
how can I get at it.

Once I knew a girl called herself Beauty
and her leather accessories Beasts.
So can things be what I name them, is that the secret.


Once on a time in Osteuropa
a girl lived who went to the Contours Club:
she touched herself on a Slope among the Sunclouds™.

That all sounds vapid.Yeah, I touched myself. Kind of fat,
never thought I was a natural, a star,
I just didn't “get" the others. But you,
you don't want to hear that part, you just want me to keep having sex
among the politics.

Fuck you: all I want to write about is
bumblebees, bumblebees.

New York School is because
you have to name things in New York.
Otherwise, too much exists