poetry books

In Another Country coming in 2024 from Saturnalia Books! ✨

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

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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

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small crimes, front cover 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

 

War and love tend to bring out the most significant questions about our lives. With an extraordinary gift for language, Andrea Jurjevic reveals our own deepest needs and longings. These poems are beautiful but hard-nosed, and this book marks the debut of a fresh and important new voice in American poetry.
— David Bottoms

 
The title of this haunting and elegant book is ironic and deeply understated. I expect irony became a way of life, a reality ever-present in the up-turned world the war and dissolution of the former Yugoslavia at the root of these almost unrelenting poems. And the understatement is almost necessary as darkly comic ballast for the weight of the narrative facts. Almost, because countering the violence and grief in the near and distant history behind these poems, is an aching cry of passion, a claim for the love in human life that restores and sustains that life to give it meaning beyond the moment, beyond the privations and despair of present time. In that implicit song of love, one finds hope, transcendence, and any reader of this painful book of serious, artistic verse, will conclude the love discovered here is earned and, at once, miraculous. This book reminds us that life, in all its iterations, is utterly shocking and beautifully defiant.
— Maurice Manning