Books from Bosnia and Herzegovina

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.

Sarajevo Blues is a collection of prose poems, fragments, and brief reflections written during the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War. Combining personal observation with documentary detail, Semezdin Mehmedinović captures the daily reality of living in a city under bombardment, where ordinary activities become acts of survival and the boundaries between private life and public catastrophe begin to dissolve. Rather than presenting a conventional narrative, the book offers an intimate, fragmented account of war through images of empty streets, sudden violence, disrupted routines, and the emotional strain of uncertainty. Mehmedinović’s restrained, lyrical writing resists grand explanations, focusing instead on the human cost of conflict and the persistence of memory. Both a literary response to historical tragedy and a meditation on displacement, fear, and endurance, Sarajevo Blues gives voice to the experience of civilians whose lives are transformed by war.