after war
by Dženana Vucic

‘after war is an unforgettable act of witness to the Bosnian genocide. This meticulously crafted collection strains against the seams of language and transcends its tragic contemporary relevance. Vucic’s grasp on the endless echoes of manmade horror wrestles against her eye for the miracle of the soul's forbearance and the bewildering abundance of grace in this world. I inhaled this book and will be returning to it again and again.’

‘A formidable first book filled with terrible beauty, fury and power. Vucic’s exquisite, unyielding verse shows us what it means to look closely at the horrors of war and genocide. This is a poetics of refusal: Vucic refuses erasure of her language, her identity, and her humanity. Vucic’s is an astounding, important and original new voice in Australian poetry.’

‘after war exposes the devastation draped across a body, both one’s own and the people around them. This white-hot collection challenges the disrecording of genocide through ferocious portraits that hang everywhere we look; in our homes, streets, skies and dreams.’

‘Those of us who have never experienced war become distanced from such tragedy, willingly or not. Each poem in Dženana Vucic’s remarkable collection, after war, asks us to look at, and not away, from destructive violence. There is beauty on these pages, as there is love, anger and loss.’

‘Harrowing, compelling, highly sensitised and linguistically skilled, these remarkable poems take us on a journey through pain and bigotry, through love and familiarity, through loss and consequence. after war suggests we all have obligations to understand and care, to prevent such wrongs happening again and again.’

‘after war is a stunning collection of viscerally unsettling poems charged by the cut, jangle and unbidden intrusions of the author’s lived experience of the Bosnian War and its aftermath. It is, at once: memoir, trauma narrative, autoethnography, testimony, a history. In its wide-ranging interventions and interrogations, it is a historiography. In its apprehension of recent atrocities (Norway; Christchurch; Palestine), it is an indictment of the world’s moral climate. In its resignation that ‘there is only so much we can do with the violence of our past’, it beseeches us to heed the present.’