Stars of the Night Commute now out: copies, parties & you

Dear friends,

I'm so happy to announce that my debut book of poetry, Stars of the Night Commute, is now out and available. I hope you'll consider getting a copy and supporting the stellar Tarpaulin Sky Press. If you would like a review copy, or if you curate a reading series and would like me to read for you, write to me! & if you have a means of helping me spread the word about the book, I'll be ever grateful and the drinks are on me.

Please join me for book parties this week in San Francisco, on Monday next week in Manhattan NY, and on 11/21 in Brooklyn. Details are below.

Thanks, handshakes and Stars:

Yours, Ana


Ana Božičević
Stars of the Night Commute

ISBN: 9780982541609
Poetry | 6"x8", 84 pp, pbk | Nov. 2009
$14 includes shipping in the US

Click here for excerpts
Click here to order

Stars of the Night Commute haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams. Many of the poems carry a shamanistic, elemental quality, as if real matter were articulating out of word-fragments. Božičević writes, "At the end of poetry the poem can no longer be remote." If this is "the end of poetry," perhaps poetry is, after all, reaching forward back to its beginning.
—Annie Finch

Ana Božičević's poetry has everything—a mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound. The words bristle with life, and they command the deepest reverence for the Ineffable, for pure Being. This poetry is clever without being shallow, and this is truly rare. Silence is my most honest response to her work, but a silence rooted in respect and awe for that which is truly great art.
—Noelle Kocot

Ana Božičević's work is sort of animist—it’s either about silence or the racket of the world. How does she do it? Clicks the switch to say it’s silent & it’s happening then on a distant tiny stage. She’s muttering, and then it’s a story and a very good one. I mean in poetry at some point you don’t know what the writer means. In Ana’s work I watch “it” vanish (all the time) & I trust it.
—Eileen Myles

Ana Božičević's work is filled with a wild freedom, and reading it often reminds me of reading Wallace Stevens, in that you know absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect. In her poems she expresses an attitude of solemn responsibility to history, both the world's and her own, yet there is often a marvelous lightness, even playfulness about them. She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial. These are not just technical matters. An émigré from reality (in the form of one of modern time's most monstrously and moronically cruel wars) and a Cassandra, she is able to perceive with the eyes of language—then render with lyrical immediacy—the experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream.
—Franz Wright


Readings & events
November 5, 2009: San Francisco, CA
SFSU Poetry Center
Ana Božičević & Amy King

November 6, 2009: San Francisco, CA
The Green Arcade
Ana Božičević & Amy King

November 9, 2009: New York, NY: BOOK PARTY!
Triptych Readings
Ana Božičević, Vijay Seshadri, and Charles Wright
7 pm @ the 11th Street Bar
510 East 11th Street, between Avenues A&B, East Village

November 30, 2009: New York, NY: BOOK PARTY!
The Poetry Project
Ana Božičević and Allison Cobb
8 pm @ St. Mark's Church
131 E. 10th St.

February 20, 2009: Raleigh, NC
The So and So Series
Ana Božičević, Brian Howe, and Amy King

May 13, 2009: Cincinnati, OH
Bon Mot/Ley


From the Author
Stars of the Night Commute is travel and transmutation: it is a becoming. Here a pile of word-stuff, some particles of stardust, have coalesced into a shape, and become the product you hold: a book. In a moment you’ll feel it with your mind-fingers. This product laughingly laments its own material from the first page, as it praise-grieves the ephemeral value of things, places, faces: relatives on another continent, soldiers, shepherds, animals, and commuters, who star in their own orbits on the daily train to and from Penn Station. The latter finger Star Magazine over the thought-static of news (wars), what to buy (jewels), and childhoods from which some were snatched, dropping a small wooden horse here, the ability to tell a story there. The refuse and language of commerce, along with the grandmother’s and dead dog’s bodies, commute by tale into the stuff of poem. There, they’re traded as luxury goods, lamented, then recycled back into star matter. The lament ends on a mountaintop where the highest status is that of leaf. How do I fit into this? I came to New York at age 19. I learned to write in English. I work and commute under, around and above the city. The book carries on with histories of my co-passengers as we make one other transition: into a fluid, praiseful queerness, where deities, pronouns and schools of poetics turn from uniforms into play garments. The book’s final section attempts a tale, a picaresque passport belonging to a multiplicitous you, them, us, him, her. The émigré writes herself an ultimate document. And the brief return at the text’s end is a decoy the length of one night: our commute recommences in the morning.


About Ana Božičević
Ana Božičević was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1977. She emigrated to NYC in 1997. Stars of the Night Commute is her first book of poems. Her fifth chapbook, Depth Hoar, will be published by Cinematheque Press in 2010. With Amy King, Ana co-curates The Stain of Poetry reading series in Brooklyn, and is co-editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School. She works at the Center for the Humanities of The Graduate Center, CUNY. For more, visit nightcommute.org.

me is him is them

He is my favorite Penn Station musician. He is an old man impossibly hunched over who energetically performs the Amarcord theme and like tunes on his keyboard flanked by two dancing saxophonist dolls and fronted by a dancing she-doll and an amp. My interest in him is not ironic: not only is he me and Fellini (whose relationship to kitsch is loving and spiritual -- kitsch-objects are Fellini's visual conduits/spirit guides to the unconscious & the "other world," which is of course no other than this world in Halloween costume), he is a proxy for my grandfather and grandmother. Grandmother passed away this spring, and during my last visit to her I knew that it really was the last. The state of the farmhouse had deteriorated, she sat hunched over (like him) in a peeling room on a dusty couch fingering an old farmer's almanac, and she was, more than ever, acutely stuff, star-matter busting, bursting to change form. We performed ourselves anyway: despite the howling of stars and the silence of stars. (There's a poem in my book that does this better.)

Brenda Iijima suggests that kitsch-objects should receive a proper burial. Her suggestion is so right-on: because they are little corpses of intention, self-proxies, that need to be laid down gently. They're grotesque but they're star-matter, dammit! A ceramic puppy figurine can be a kawaii pet or it can be an object of loathing, and thus so much more emotionally successful that many an art object: what are the poems that make you go Awww or Ewww? I'll tell you: Aase Berg. This puppy is so cute I want to crush its head/eat it (paging the memories of Amy King!). Here's Sianne Ngai on "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde" and Murakami, I love that fucking essay. So yeah, all I'm saying has been said (better), but perhaps I can remind you. Also there's the anime Paprika where the murderer surrounds himself, and is subsumed, by "a parade of inanimate objects, instrument-playing animals, and various cultural icons." Our impulse to love kitsch could be Stockholm syndrome. Maybe we love these objects to appease their murderous instincts (our instincts projected onto them), their chaotic nature: the mass of what we made will swallow us in retaliation, pull us into the mass grave of capitalism's refuse, the world dump: all because we didn't give them a proper burial? (Some people are not afraid of "degradation and decomposition:" read this excellent interview with --> Joyelle McSweeney.) There's a Polish (?) fantasy story about a writer mutilated & killed by his characters. Perhaps it's that in kitsch objects, the howling of stars is so audible: the love and aggression and pity they fill us with are so cosmic they become blank signposts to the void. At the end of an absolute proliferation of objects, there must be an explosion, followed by a nothing: silence. Don't be afraid, though: a sapling will grow out of that silence, green sigh of relief...

OK, so more on why I refuse to be afraid tomorrow.

me is kitsch

as a part of my new no-fear campaign, i'm starting to blog a bit again. tell me if you want to hear more about this no-fear campaign. today i'm talking about kitsch. if you want to read something haute about kitsch, this is not the place. you should probably go read adorno. you might want to read about gurlesque and kitsch. instead, this morning via johannes via robert p. baird comes this from agamben: “rimbaud’s programmatic exclamation ‘I is another’ (je est un autre) must be taken literally: the redemption of objects is impossible except by virtue of becoming an object.” since we moved to massapequa, long island, that object is often a garden gnome, or a baptismal statuette (see at above left: man and child waist-deep in a lawn that is wannabe water). my interest in these objects is not ironic, but spiritual. this is my spiritual project: it's the vocation of being personally responsible for the redemption of kitschy, abandoned "art" in the back of TJ Maxx, the detritus of foreclosures in programmed suburban landscapes: “and when I saw them devoid of spirit/ I decided to stay/ and be their spirit.” that line is from an upcoming chapbook, Depth Hoar. writing Depth Hoar was an exercise in humility: i felt unable to connect to a deep place of words, and instead scraped what i saw as hoar from the surface of image, the sweat of depth: fake words, statuettes from the back of TJ Maxx. "Art." rather than for their ironic value, these objects matter for the seed of idea they still hide in their grotesque garments, because like the "nameless dead" they have to be treasured for my life to make sense. it's not (just) pity. maybe it's about incarnation: i am thing, and they too are thing: we're that nothing thing.