Say Fire
Bosnia and Herzegovina

Say Fire

by Selma Asotić

War & Conflict Poetry 2025

Summary

What does it mean to inherit a war you can never fully leave behind? In this powerful debut poetry collection, Bosnian poet Selma Asotić explores the lingering wounds of the Bosnian War, tracing how violence becomes embedded in family histories, bodies, and memories. Through vivid, fragmented poems, she moves between childhood recollections, the grief of losing loved ones, the troubled legacy of a soldier uncle, and the search for intimacy in a world shaped by conflict. Her writing also embraces lesbian desire, female solidarity, and the complicated relationship between a daughter and her mother. Fire becomes both a destructive force and a symbol of resistance—a language for experiences that ordinary words cannot contain. Moving between tenderness and anger, silence and confession, Asotić asks whether poetry can recover what history has shattered. Say Fire is a deeply personal exploration of survival, belonging, and the struggle to reclaim one’s voice from the ruins of the past.

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Country
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Europe
About the author
Selma Asotić
Selma Asotić

Selma Asotić is a Bosnian bilingual poet born in 1992 in Sarajevo during the siege of the city. Her work explores the intersections of love, political violence, memory, gender, and the enduring consequences of war. She studied English language and literature and comparative literature at the University of Sarajevo before earning an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Alongside her writing, she has worked as a translator, interpreter, and educator, teaching at Boston University and New York University. From 2017 to 2021, she edited BONA, a feminist theory and arts journal in Sarajevo. Her debut collection, Reci vatra, appeared in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia in 2022, winning the Stjepan Gulin Prize that year and the Štefica Cvek Prize in 2023. The English-language edition, Say Fire, introduced her intensely lyrical and politically engaged poetry to a wider international readership.

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Details
Published
2025
Author
Selma Asotić