"Selma Asotić's Say Fire arrives as a rare and mesmeric force, a fever dream of language from which one refuses to wake. 'Hear me speak . . . my voice / wide as daybreak'—and out of these utterances come stunned songs, poems vast in their reach. Say Fire is replete with restless ghosts and griefs, with rich desires, with wars that follow one 'through continents / in rugged caravans,' and with the charred landscape of collective memory. Paying rapturous attention to the realm of the unsayable and of what evades the clench of memory, Asotić’s lines are estranging and synesthetizing, to electrifying effect. Say Fire is sui generis, and Asotić’s talent is utterly unmistakeable."
—Jenny Xie

"In Say Fire, Selma Asotic’s masterful debut, the flames of language present a Mobius strip of history and memory and the never-endingness of war. 'How fast the shadows lengthen when you try to outrun them,' she writes. And while the outrunning may be impossible, the witnessing, with its hamster wheel of suffering, grenades and loss—and also love and tenderness and resolve—is not. In this arresting reckoning, Asotic writes: I think of you/ in as many ways as the rains falls. It’s a searing rain and fire she gives us, and an all-too-timely reminder of the untiring half-life and brutality of war."
—Andrea Cohen