For Me, the War Begins in an Elevator

A collection of poems that carry the writer and the reader with their music and wisdom into life's complications, especially when you grow up during a devastating war that pits neighbors against each other. Dziho-Sator is a young Bosnian woman writing in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. She writes powerful, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic poems about being a child of war, becoming a woman, and interacting with family and friends. She is a professor of English literature and language with a gift for humor and immense skill at using the English language to break open new ways of seeing. 

As Serbian poet Ivana Maksic writes about this book, ""Aida Džiho Sator's poetry rewards us with a rare simplicity and wisdom. It deals with our complex personal histories and collective memories, and the questions of guarding them, no matter how selective they are. Lines are hesitant, as if interrupted; they express a bewilderment of a child trying to distinguish a play from a lethal war strategy, tornado from detonation, menstruation from being wounded, hugging from clogging. The exploration of language is focused on its paradoxes and ambiguities - the war breaks when it starts, elevator is downing you, not lifting you - with a strong emphasis on imagery - a pupil is a deep black hole; bodies and heads - white and pink spots in a frozen painting. Her poetic voice impersonates and inhabits individual bodies and places of suffering, thus standing against the processes of freezing and abstracting that threaten our very humanity. Powerful in its lucidity, it questions rather than answers the most challenging ideas of wholeness, identity, self-expression and the possibility of translation. For we speak by breaking the silence, but also speak by what remains silent."