“In Another Country” by Andrea Jurjevic

It’s easy to forget the opening line of “Nastic Movements,” the first poem of In Another Country by Andrea Jurjevic, is “Sweetness, back home.” The sweet in this case is more the elusive, fatal beauty of the familiar than any saccharine indulgence. In “Nastic Movements,” fatal threats are always near “like a snake around a hot rock” though relaxed, surreal, or almost humorous, like a pubic hair found in the teeth. The word nastic describes plants that adapt to sudden turgor, aka swelling, on one part of the plant. In this particular case, the diasporic Croatian family swells with emotion after loss. But Jurjevic knows the history of the family and Sarajevo, and she can tell the truth, baby, about the tricks of longing and the moon. The sweet truth is in the ocean’s “steady, back-arching roar” because it reminds us of our brief, love- and homesick lives.

As a multigenre artist, Andrea Jurjevic is a poet of immense color and vibrant sound. It’s hard to get too far without a stunner of a line, or figuration unlike anything you’ve heard. You might have to look up some words such as nastic or argot, and this makes the reading all the more compelling. Jurjevic also moves deftly across cultures, referencing punk rock and Russian masters, as she travels geographies from the Balkan coast to the American Southwest and back to the Southeast. At every stop, she invites us into intimate portraits.

But the opening portraiture reveals women, the mother and Nona, who have endured too much to be immediately available. Jurjevic survives, aware of their legacy. “It’s too late to pretend to be alive,” she writes recalling Nona and her dad on New Year’s Eve when she was ten (14). As the medieval practice in remote Balkan villages when there is no male heir, Jurjevic becomes the head of the house, the author of her own survival. The opening section ends with her son (the prince) revealing his one armpit hair “as fragrant as a sea flower.”

But as the book proceeds across oceans, the American desert, and the South, Jurjevic does not give up her autonomy. Her pseudo-adolescent, punk-rock speaker is at the center of every portrait, spinning off lines like “what’s wrong / with a bit of vomit” or “crotch-hair shy-curling into its own heat.” In the same instant, Jurjevic drops references to Breugel, Hamlet, and Hopper as she speeds toward breakup and entropy. Her “Epithalamium” sonnet celebrates lost love through describing an abandoned and obliterated landscape. It is a melancholy song celebrating a lost relationship rendered as a domestic implosion and ending with drowned kittens (risky … and devastating).

More breakup leads her back to retold and invented myths. Jurjevic’s thrilling and erotic love poems take us deeper into intimate, tragic rooms where John Coltrane plays into the unending hunger and ceaseless desire. In “Nighttide on Marona Street,” Jurjevic writes: “Again that / simmering worry […] the empty bowl of my stomach […] We sleep so close I think / of large crates of fish pressed against / each other.” In the bedrooms, Jurjevic carries the inheritance of loss, so much that even her body is often defined as wreckage “[her] womb—that demolished room.” But sexual energy abounds, and she authors it at every turn. Conjured myths, such as “They Say The Owl Is The Baker’s Daughter,” “Department of Dream Justice,” and “Bulgarian Dentist In My Kitchen,” just arrive like narrative boats on the dark tides of her Adriatic lyrics. In “Mouth Gags and Shadows,” she captures the center of the text: “you’ve a curious sensation that you’ve lived in this room many times before, / that chestnuts are still beautiful, and the universe is nothing / but a broken sex toy.” The chestnuts, a teasing fruitfulness, recall an innocence that desire cannot seem to capture.

“Elegy with Golden Oriole” provides similar tensions and some compelling ambiguities:

In my dreams, they arrive, eyes large,

bloodshot, filled with the inability to budget

emotion, the way I knew them after

love. Carry me, said one whose mother

rattled for air while I kept him in bed.

Woman of my dreams, said another—late

winter, ocean choking on trash—bury me,

and reached into his secondhand coat

to pull out a pack of Winston Gold

and a thin amber ring—a begging

mouth of a songbird my finger

fell into. The dream ends in a blink,

the proposer bows out, folds his body

into a box, like a piece of hotel stationary.

Again, Jurjevic’s speaker is the sexual captor of ambiguous men. They are needy and emotional like birds but also like the speaker’s Balkan ghosts. One seems to want a more substantial relationship before backing out. But there is also a sudden reversal—the captor becomes the emotional and needy “songbird.” The man becomes the mass-produced, degraded lover. Love is again lost, like it was in the speaker’s youth.

Jurjevic uses figuration, art, and music to try to plumb the nature of her desire, but we don’t get the impression it can ever be satisfied. Even in her dreams when she can recall her home and family, she says, “For eternity we’re a house on fire” (67). And later, when her sister writes, “The swallows didn’t return this year,” she tells us, “Baby, I want to be a swallow. Smallest, bluest of them” (68). Jurjevic wants to fly away in her blues and not return, and she wants to be consumed. But she has obligations to her family, her former self and her offspring. In Another Country is a hell of a book. It speaks the language of oceans, of lost countries, and of the body’s sensual racket. Enjoy its metaphysical leaps as well as its transgressive tendencies—all of which begin and end with desire.

Andrea Jurjevic

Andrea Jurjevic is a native of Croatia. Her debut poetry collection Small Crimes won the Philip Levine Prize, and her chapbook Nightcall was selected for the ACME Poem Company Surrealist Poetry Series. Her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Believer, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review and The New Republic, among many other publications. She was the recipient of a Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award.