Selected by Tracie Morris in our 2020 Open Call for First Books.
Ada Smailbegovic's debut collection, THE CLOUD NOTEBOOK, is a long poem that unfolds from the narrative instability and fracturing that occurs from experiences of forced displacement and war, and from configurations of gender and power. Rendering spaces of waiting, suspension, and a kind of fractal recurrence in which the fragment is held, revisited, and re-performed in memory, Smailbegovic explores how languages and objects come to compose worlds, as well as to carry traces of dislocated and disappearing worlds. The poem assumes what Sara Ahmed refers to as a "migrant orientation" as a continuous problematic of narration or representation. Deftly dissolving the seam between language and sensation, material and thought, THE CLOUD NOTEBOOK is at once playful, probing, elegiac, humorous, and ceaselessly, spellbindingly metamorphic.
