Rise in the Fall

Poetry. LGBT Studies. 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. Navigating literary history, gender, sexuality, economics, family and friends, she is at ease employing both 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."

"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."—Eileen Myles