by Matt Schroeder
In Andrea Jurjević’s In Another Country, winner of the 2022 Saturnalia Books Prize, dreams and memory entwine like snakes beneath our homes. Early poems weave through cultural and childhood memories of the former Yugoslavia. Jurjević’s experience as a painter ensures vivid colors and images throughout the collection. Using English, Croatian, Bulgarian, and Russian, as well as language that puts readers in the speaker’s body, she demonstrates the immense control necessary to survive in a strange, new land. Yet, despite shifting across American landscapes, the sea, in all its surreal iterations, is always calling Jurjević back to the Dalmatian coast.
Early poems in the collection focus on Balkan culture and history: sworn virgins who give up their sex to become sons, the goddess Morana, concentration camps turned psychiatric hospitals, the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide of Srebrenica, Danilo Kiš, Dalmatia’s čakavski dialect. But these references never feel didactic. Instead, they create a vellum of memory, which Jurjević then lays upon various American landscapes to reveal “an immigrant who never arrives / home” (59). From D.C. to Texas, all the way to Nevada, the long shadow of her homeland, and her childhood, is always nearby.
The collection is a collage of sound and color, and often references art, music, and writing. There are poems titled after John Prine songs; epigraphs from Bettie Smith; lines from Los Lobos; and mothers dying while lovers listen to John Coltrane. Many lines lean on sound “as / if between song and suffering there is only nimble weather, bodies wet with meaning” (83). Jurjević entices readers with ekphrasis, referencing Fuseli’s Symplegma and Modigliani’s Kneeling Blue Caryatid (which is a drawing of none other than Anna Akhmatova). Directives make language leap from the page: “Think // of how a color learns its language––” (33). Her muscled music, verging on synesthesia, nods to both the prowess of Jurjević as a surrealist, as well as her time as a painter. With phrases like “iridescent bruises… purple-tight… black-licking… spoiled blue / sliver of the world”, Jurjević’s images rise from the page in strange and exciting ways (34-76).
Embodiment features prominently in the poems, too. As an immigrant, Jurjević “wear[s] this rental house, the government // of its bones, like a good foreigner,” while a “Real American cowboy” claps her ass, and her son rushes with glee to show his first armpit hair (21-23). Lovers come and go from the speaker’s bed, where there is “suffering // pleasure, an arrangement that resists the static of grief” (82). Imperatives pierce the pages like sunlight, creating the sense that “we all author and haunt our own dreams” (50). But Jurjević does not rest. Her razor-sharp attention leaves no angle of the self unexplored.
Andrea Jurjević’s In Another Country interrogates the borders of countries, art, and memory. The complex balance of violence and love, loss and language sings with constant tension. Collage works on numerous levels and each read reveals something new. She proves that Balkan literature, regardless of where it is written, is in fact, “Homo Poeticus, the poetic animal that suffers from love as well as mortality, from metaphysics as well as politics” (Kiš). Through expertly-crafted images and language, Jurjević reveals the many unexpected and haunting possibilities that exist between dreams and memory.
