FAIR LAWN, NJ
What these girls did I could not: black tights
in June, knowing which spoon for goat's milk,
which for slow-cooked stew, pray from right
to left. Grace: the way they prayed
in long sleeves in sunlight, hair
like wet grass, clean palms warm and pale
as bread. I know now what I meant to ask:
Can I touch your hand, though what I did
was bite. There must be a word for the lack
of words for the things we have felt all
our lives, but couldn't name, a name
for the hymn that moves our blood,
old and dire, like the rain
that once shined each green blade
of that town, not each girl, but the grass
that blooms and blooms and blooms.
from the book WHEN THERE WAS LIGHT / Four Way Books
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"New Life – Ana Božičević"

"A systematic longing, these poems form dialogues amid lives possible and lives lost. Within the inevitable splitting of the self that results from being constrained to exist physically in one place at a time while possessing what can feel like an almost infinite awareness of possibility, her speaker’s concept of self forms and reforms from thought to thought, line to line."

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What Sparks Poetry:
Michael Dumanis on Language as Form

"What determines the facts in question is the language, as well as the constraints I place on myself as an author. This is an autobiography that is not capable of ever saying 'I' or 'me' or 'mine,' as no words it uses can begin with any letter other than A. As a result, the poem is composed almost exclusively of sentence fragments."
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