Description
Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. JOY OF MISSING OUT is starlite verse on death and independence for the dreamers, dropouts, rebels and the neuroatypical. A confession and sublimation of breakdowns personal and systemic, JOY OF MISSING OUT paints a playful and unflinching portrait of the ups and downs of city survival and queer romance. Simultaneously it deploys online slang and high lyrical registers, morphs the sad girl into Baba Yaga, drops truth bombs on art and politics, and puts the sin into sincerity. Even as it engineers the death of its speaker, JOY OF MISSING OUT is a paradoxically joyous litany of her endurance and a boost-plea to stay in a messed-up world and say it out loud. This anthem is best read at night or dawn when no one's around for a Like or a kiss.
"Ana Božičević invents a new language of 21st century displacement: a displacement that occurs not just in space and in time but in heart, vision and mind.The poems in JOY OF MISSING OUT range from Croatian farm fields and embroidered dresses to life spent online, emoji, chain stores and drugs. Always: emotion. No filter, she writes. Božičević is a master of the startling lyric: her poems transport, but they can also kick dirt in your face in the last line. Her casual poems are formidably informed and, also, great." —Chris Kraus
"Auto-erotic (sunlit) pool life + 'the funny softness at the deep end of the field' = JOY OF MISSING OUT. Mid-ocean, is that sound of civilians being murdered, or is it Julie Andrews exclaiming in B minor on an Alpine piste? (Or meadow.) This book is full of switches. Pull the wrong one and there's no Europe. To put it another way, are there continents, cities and countrysides that, having left them, a person might never see again? Twenty-first Century 101: 'Stupid pleasures' substitute in their entirety for a very real glacier, etc. I have loved Božičević's poetry for a long time, and it was a glamorous treat for me to be with it again. The extreme poetry that will never, precisely, return."—Bhanu Kapil
Author Bio
Ana Božičević grew up in Zadar, Croatia before coming to Brooklyn, New York. Ana is a poet, translator, teacher, and occasional singer. She is the author of Povratak lišća / Return of the Leaves, Selected Poems in Croatian (Hrvatsko Društvo Pisaca/Croatian Writers Society, 2020); JOY OF MISSING OUT (Birds, LLC, 2017); the Lambda Award-winning RISE IN THE FALL (Birds, LLC, 2013), and STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009).
Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA