Nine Alexandrias: New Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series) - Softcover

Semezdin Mehmedinovic

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872864235 ISBN 13: 9780872864238

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2003

Synopsis

Translated from the Bosnian with an introduction by Ammiel Alcalay

Following his depiction of Bosnia under siege in the much celebrated Sarajevo Blues, Semezdin Mehmedinovic´ now explores the vast space of his new continent. Mostly written in response to a cross-country journey by train in post 9-11 America, Mehmedinovic´’s Nine Alexandrias provides a poetry of witness and testimony of a very different order. In this nightmarish and exhilarating odyssey, Mehmedinovic´’s political acuity is displayed everywhere but barely pronounced. In Washington, D.C., his new home, the graphic and tactile affirmation of life amidst horror depicted so masterfully in Sarajevo Blues, turns into an eerie silence that permeates both the expanse of the land and the heart of the American empire.

Semezdin Mehmedinovic´ was born in Tuzla, Bosnia in 1960 and is the author of five books. Mehmedinovic´ arrived in the U.S. as a political refugee in 1996, and he is currently living in Alexandria, Virginia.

About this title

About the Author

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic and scholar who teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is the Deputy Chair of the PhD Program in English. His latest work is Scrapmetal (Factory School, 2006). He is also editor and translator of Keys to the Garden, and Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Sarajevo Blues, both published by City Lights.

From Publishers Weekly

In 1996, Mehmedinovic, then a Sarajevo-based poet and dissident originally from Bosnia, emigrated to the U.S. as a political refugee. His third book, Sarajevo Blues, was published in 1998 by City Lights, also with translations by Alcalay (From the Warring Factions). Now in his early 40s, Mehmedinovic offers this fourth collection, completed in 2001. It consists of three sequences; two of them, while purposefully understated, are as good as anything published in English this year. The title series of short lyrics opens, imagining "at least nine cities in America called Alexandria" (his is the one outside of Washington D.C. in Virginia) and how one might "mov[e] from one/ American Alexandria to another,/ On the same Egyptian dock" as the poet and poems cross the country. The terrific "This Door Is Not an Exit," written in slowed-down, sometimes fragmentary couplets, reflects on exile in the aftermath of violence, death and continued political insolubility: "I am, in fact, where you are, to make/ your weariness inspire meaning." The final sequence, "8 Things About Cadillac," takes in everything from the ironies of a luxury car named for a destroyed people (and that now drives over their land), to the fact that "The longest lasting Cadillac in memory/ Is the one JFK is dying in." Alcalay's English never feels forced or rushed, and his very acute introduction articulates the book's underlying conceit perfectly: "Mehmedinovic's narrator holds the pulse to the real by protecting us from what he has seen and known in another life.... a very different kind of witness" that "transports us to an America we haven't yet known but must be prepared to recognize." Readers will find their various Alexandrias among the many geographical muses here.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0872864235
• ISBN 13: 9780872864238
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 98