Saturnalia 2024
 
"Anchored by the desire to find a home in a place of in-betweenness—among cultures, languages and identities—In Another Country reflects on war and memory, death and art, love and desire, and the immigrant experience. While containing arresting imagery and various cultural references, such as American film and music, these poems nod to other artists who have made their home away from their homeland, such as the Turkish writer and director Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Although Jurjevic’s poems navigate the disorienting terrain of self, they have a strong sense of geography and concrete reality. These poems wear a dark sensuality. They are inquisitive, direct, and at times erotic.
I was instantly enveloped by the night-tide logic of the poems, their unruly image-making, and their commitment to the “department of dream justice,” so to speak. I was compelled by the strangeness and estrangement of moods synonymous with displaced experience, and drawn also to the entangled scenes of war, lineage, danger, and desire, embodiment, self-figuration, a “post-socialist palimpsest” of self, in anxiety and joy, and across a range of cultural reference able to contain Srebrenica, Morana, “microtonal moments” of intimacy, Mulholland Drive, Coltrane, and Hüsker Dü, among others. “What’s the word for the torn lip of the horizon twitching under the yellow fist of the sun?” Extraordinary.
—Roberto Tejada, Saturnalia Books Prize judge"