Winner of the 2022 Saturnalia Book Prize selected by Roberto Tejada

Anchored by the desire to find a home in a place of in-betweenness—among cultures, languages and identities—IN ANOTHER COUNTRY reflects on war and memory, death and art, love and desire, and the immigrant experience. While containing arresting imagery and various cultural references, such as American film and music, these poems nod to other artists who have made their home away from their homeland, such as the Turkish writer and director Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Although Jurjevic’s poems navigate the disorienting terrain of self, they have a strong sense of geography and concrete reality. These poems wear a dark sensuality. They are inquisitive, direct, and at times erotic.

Available from ✨ AMAZON ✨BARNES & NOBLE ✨IPG ✨

I was instantly enveloped by the night-tide logic of the poems, their unruly image-making, and their commitment to the “department of dream justice,” so to speak. I was compelled by the strangeness and estrangement of moods synonymous with displaced experience, and drawn also to the entangled scenes of war, lineage, danger, and desire, embodiment, self-figuration, a “post-socialist palimpsest” of self, in anxiety and joy, and across a range of cultural reference able to contain Srebrenica, Morana, “microtonal moments” of intimacy, Mulholland Drive, Coltrane, and Hüsker Dü, among others. “What’s the word for the torn lip of the horizon twitching under the yellow fist of the sun?” Extraordinary.

—Roberto Tejada, Saturnalia Books Prize judge

Andrea Jurjević’s In Another Country is a stunning collection that explores the inheritances of language and memory. These gorgeous poems engage both silence and tongues, history and the present, daydreams and nocturnes that serve as lullabies for lost countries and countries we feel lost within. Each one is so deeply felt, the body so present with all its aches and longings and joys and laments. I am truly astonished line by line, by its beauty and by the strength  it takes “to dig oneself out of a country erasing itself.” I’m even more in love with language at the end of this book.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal 

This collection of eros and elegy traverses the “citizenry of in-betweenness”—the landscapes, languages, and cultures of a displaced self—with fierce and lush intimacy. In these poems, we are invited to witness the harrowing aftermath of war as well as the complex solace of desire. These poems are sensual, visceral, and transformative. Through Jurjević’s perception, we can begin to see the beautiful bloom inside a gutted fish, the sweet tenderness of itinerant drunks, a spoon stirring “in murderous circles,” and “the moon tossing her long white hair / across the ocean.” In Another Country writes fever into form. It beguiles and surprises like a dream.

—Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of Desire Museum 

In Another Country Playlist 🏹🌍🌊

—————————————————————————————————————-

NIGHTCALL (2021)
Selected for the ACME Poem Company Surrealist Poetry Series

These poems offer surreal explorations of both our concrete reality and the disorienting terrain of self.  Jurjević traverses a gritty landscape of memory, love, sorrow, and sex with unswerving honesty and stunning imagery. Erotic, devastating, and deeply searching, this is a book anchored by yearning and the willingness to search out its answer in every doorway and street, and on every shore.

Erotic, contemplative, at times surreal, these vibrant poems of the body—its pleasures, its diasporic drift—create an “intoxicating ministry of dusk,” where even “the moon, translucent,” becomes “a soap bubble” on a lover’s “glistening back.” In the nocturnal, pulsing world of Nightcall, Jurjević reminds us, “We all author and haunt our own dreams.”
—Sandra Meek, author of Still  

Available from Willow Springs Books

What we have in Nightcall is not “comely verse” but something harsher, tangier, and more interesting—what the poem “Chromatics of Touch” might call “suffering // pleasure.” Jurjević has a particular mastery of the stichic line; flint fractured against stone to create tools that flay ekphrastic convention, incise geographies, and slice between languages. As “Nocturne with Burning Morana” asks, “What’s the word for the torn lip of the horizon twitching under the yellow fist of the sun?” This collection constantly surprises me with its images, but the sensibility has a steady signature. Andrea Jurjević is making her mark. 
—Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode

Jurjević’s Nightcall takes from the world and builds another with vivid, unrelenting consciousness. Each object is both touching and touched. They’re both breathing and breathed on. The level of sensuality in these poems is alive, dark, toyed with and is pressed into the mind like a beauteous stain.
—Jerriod Avant, two-time Pushcart nominee, poetry & photography editor of Kinfolks

—————————————————————————————————– Small Crimes (2017)

Andrea Jurjević’s Small Crimes begins during the Croatian war years of the early 1990’s.  In the midst of bombings, sniper shootings, and firing squads, the speaker of the poems manages to live an almost normal adolescence, thanks to her grit, her attachment to family, and her skepticism.  The book then moves to the postwar years and onward into America, which is not without its own perils.  This is a collection that is often dark but just as often beautiful. Jurjević’s language crackles with energy, and she lingers lovingly over the intimate details of a life that is lived with the eyes wide open.

— C. G. Hanzlicek, Philip Levine Prize judge

• Winner, 2015 Philip Levine Prize
• Winner, 2018 Georgia Author of the Year, Poetry

Available at AMAZON and at ANHINGA PRESS 

I love the way, in Andrea Jurjevic’s poems, beauty and horror walk arm-in-arm, the way each poem is dense, cacophonous with images, complex and layered as a Kusturica film; the way I want to look away, sometimes, and can’t. I love the way she takes me, through her poems, to the human underside of the war in her native Balkans, and to the underside of America, and to the underside of love. I love the wrecked love poems most of all, for their brutal tenderness, for what survives.
— Cecilia Woloch