reviewed on December 2, 2025

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Say Fire is a slow burn.

 

After an opening sequence smoldering at best—focused on its speaker’s sexual experience and “coming out,” as the title of one poem puts it—the book roars into brilliance halfway through, where it shifts its energy to the Bosnian War of the early 1990s, which the speaker and her family experience firsthand. 

 

In the aftermath of that conflict, the speaker’s soldier-uncle commits suicide using a pineapple grenade, an act recounted in Say Fire across a series of prose poems titled “Uncle.” As in Solmaz Sharif’s “Personal Effects,” her uncle’s death occasions for Asotić self-reflexive meditation on the imaginative capacities—and limitations—of poetry as an art, as these prose poems rehearse various iterations of her uncle’s last moments, each one ending “That’s not how it happened.”  Throughout Say Fire these elegies expand in both scale and scope, like a widening aperture through which Asotić accesses some more or less unreliable family history.  When Asotić breaks tendency late in the book, therefore, withholding the poems’ closing qualification, the effect is stunning, as of a belated revelation of truth:

 

                                                                                                         He takes his

hands out of his pockets, uncoils his right fist.  The grenade lies like

a fallen sparrow on his palm.  One last inscrutable thought scurries

across his mind.  He pulls out the pin.

 

Somewhere in the city, a phone rings.

My mother collapses to the floor.

 

Cinematic in its visual intensity, horrific in its narrative, this passage and “Uncle” in its entirety depart from the surrealism of Say Fire’s earlier poems, in which Asotić indulges a dissociative “weirdness” and frenetic image-making akin to that popularized thirty years ago—during the Balkan War, as it happens—in MFA programs at Iowa and UMass Amherst.  One thinks, across the first dozen or so poems in Say Fire, of early Heather Christle (UMA) before she found anti-capitalism, or Matthea Harvey (Iowa) or the weird Matthews: Rohrer (Iowa) and Zapruder (UMA).  Here, for instance, is the first stanza of “Monologue for a first date”:

 

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.

 

In these poems, self-fascinated in their sexual entendre, Asotić is as questionable as Dorothea Lasky (UMA), as empty as Fall Out Boy: “Fingers tumbling / down the skin like September.”

 

But then she catches fire.

 

Had the heart of this book—its middle poems on the Bosnian War, and on the death of the speaker’s uncle—been merely an investigation into the power of poetry as historiography, it would certainly be an impressive achievement, albeit a familiar one.  Yet as Say Fire develops, Asotić pushes past this concern to a broader and more damning implication of institutional intellectualism, including poetry, in systems of neoliberal ideology.  In two facing poems, the best in the book, Asotić indicts extractive research economies that would commodify the Bosnian War into a line on an academic CV.  “A peace studies graduate,” Asotić writes in “they descend upon us,” “whenever there’s a war Nick from Connecticut is deployed to spread common sense, ask the right questions—why, instead of why not. […] a few more genocides and he’ll join the tenure track.”

 

If a tad too pleased with its satire of well-meaning white liberalism—satire itself endorsed by institutional intellectuals—these two poems nonetheless channel the hopeless rage and glossed-over despair of those who “are now bleeding on CNN’s chyron.”  “The screen shows a man giving his child / to a soldier,” Asotić describes in the deliberately glib “Lessons from a war”:

 

          his hands are the hands of your father,

or the father of your father, same difference.

you are somewhere, among the blessed, on some square

you sip an espresso, the woman next to you says

how awful.  your contempt blooms precious and pure.

 

This move feels fresh to me, frank in its achievement of a self-righteous rage which Asotić refuses, at the same time, to exempt from critique.  Its early poems may be kindling, but Say Fire blazes in this later mode, hot with the intensity of unacknowledged grievance, radiant with the light of its own searing historiography.