Charting the Night: A review of Ana Boźičević's Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpulin Sky Press, 2009)

Ana Boźičević's Stars of the Night Commute adopts the trope of the night train ride, taking us on strange commute across our own darkness: "WE MIGHT BE ON AN INVISIBLE PLANK / ABOVE THE DARKNESS AND IT MIGHT BE / A BLESSING." Boźičević juxtaposes against the pathos of the quotidian world against a prosody of disruption, disturbance, the phantasmal, the voices of her fellow travelers performing an off-beat duet with her own. "Here the strange is commonplace and always was commonplace."1

Stars of the Night Commute leaps precipitously between the mundane and the fantastic, scoring a gap that dares us to leap. In "God Is President, She's the Rose of the World", Boźičević ironically reconstrues 'reality': "When it's that time of the month / it's like falling backwards in "time." // God has abandoned her glass carriage, / she is "dead." In that hallucinatory image, she assures us that no mere feminizing of the divine will rescue us from ourselves: "the world's time is God, and she's birds / atwitter", her satiric line-break heralding the hell which is 'home', heaven an absurd illusion of spring.

You dream of your uncle turning a lamb on a spit
high on a green cliff, with fog thickening around him

and then he's made to swallow keys and little hammers–

you claw the red clay.
Now wake.
Show me the bouquet!

No, don't show me the bouquet.

Show me the bouquet!
If you do, I won't tell on you

To the rose of the world. She can make him hear you up there.
Besides, it's not a cliff, it's a chair.

That chair we already know is "growing in hell," "the twitter, the muddy shiver" to which we return from Boźičević's dream.

The past, "the suitcase full of blood I carry," haunts these poems. They compose from the night's stars a "Document, Needle, Map" by which to cross this unsettled, unsettling terrain. Boźičević's strange reverie not only opens memory's ruptures, it also elides the gap by which language abandons her, proffering a means of entry across the gulf of loss: the lost world returned within the liminal space of dream.

"Somewhere a pillowcase
Somethere I allow
my head
out of the hat, & the oval mother
the incontinent father
walk down the brim.
Their sorrowful valises.
& tiny centurions march
down my collarbone
into one open palm."

Stars of the Night Commute, responding to Boźičević's experiences as a young woman during the war in the former Yugoslavia and her 'translation' to the United States, asserts that even love stumbles at violence's ruptures : "Soon you'll become // another war I can't quite talk about." Love offers only a diffident, uncertain solace in the face of the wounded past. Another 'dream,' love stitches, fitfully, at the torn space between one life and another, recuperating feeling: tenderness bringing familiarity to a world made unrecognizably strange by violence.

The way you took me in without
A surfeit click or

gesture: seagull kerchief
binding my gut to safety
on the swimming haul
among night-images.               I went to the place I was born
and it plainly was a bride.  So I ran after her.

When she turned into a star I swallowed her.
And out of this uneasiness will come
an aster.

In these poems, love holds, though fractionally. Boźičević writes hopefully, "A heart glows in / me. A heart," yet her collection closes with a cataclysm of grief, a "Zoo" wherein "I'm crying, sewing, barking: almost slowing / down. What's slain? Your name. . . . / You enter, close opened / windows. Your room's summerless."

Boźičević's lines splinter under the weight of violence's insane logic, language becoming a "riddle." How enter it, inhabit like a familiar place, lodging, home, how when it is not one's own? When it must carry the burden of that "suitcase full of blood"? Language breaks, falters, stutters against the gap of translation and otherness, against the violence of history. Dashes, parentheses, interruptions, repetitions, long hyphenated strings force page and language open, write it with absence. Paired with dream imagery, disturbed, destabilized, Boźičević's poetry make the ineffable articulate.

Light was the first animal of the visible, then
stumbled. Your room in The Glass Tavern, a view of

heel clicks heel clicks heel clicks

air.

(Sad now. Who-will-feed you-the evening-spoon.)

Ana Boźičević maps a textual space in which articulation, burdened by violence, is itself rent. No longer 'simple', language becomes independable, hesitant, almost incomprehensible; the possibility of feeling, desperate. Charting her way amid loss, grief, across the absurd banalities of the night commute – riding through hell – Boźičević does not promise that love heals all wounds: redemption is uncertain, held moment by moment before it vanishes into its own mercurial dream. Such vision and language may be indeed the "blessing" we need now against the feckless, absurd violence of our 'dream,' our 'war against terror.'



1 Alejo Carpentier, "The Baroque and the Marvelous Real". Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris p. 102-104.

Ekleksographia:
Wave 4.1.c

August, 2010

Review

Marthe Reed

Marthe Reed has published two books, most recently Gaze (Black Radish Books), as well as Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink). She has two chapbooks from the Dusie Kollektiv, (em)bodied bliss and zaum alliterations. Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, HOW2, Big Bridge, MiPoesias, Exquisite Corpse, and Fairy Tale Review. She edits Nous-zot Press.