The Cloud Notebook

Selected by Tracie Morris in our 2020 Open Call for First Books.

Ada Smailbegovic's debut poetry 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. The poem assumes what Sara Ahmed refers to as a "migrant orientation": a continuous problematic of narrative unfolding that renders spaces of suspension, waiting, and a kind of fractal reoccurrence in which the narrative fragment is held, revisited and re-performed in memory, as it often represents the only remainder of a now dislocated world. Deeply engaged with the material and sensual qualities of language, Smailbegovi? explores how language and its objects come to compose worlds and, at times, to outlive them as insistent residue of the past. The Cloud Notebook is at once playful, probing, elegiac, humorous, and ceaselessly, spellbindingly metamorphic.

"The Cloud Notebook is like an impressionist painting, like the punctum detail of a collage. It's a smart, soulful, traumatized and elegant collection."-- Tracie Morris

"I did not want this book to end. Like a great work of science fiction, The Cloud Notebook asks us to reimagine perception, using the study of matter as an antidote to contemporary ideology. Smailbegovic takes influence from memories of childhood, spiritual practice, conceptualism, botany, alchemy, and house parties--yielding a series of accessible philosophies of rescue, dreaming, guessing, worship, description, hosting, mending. An intensely trained and liberatory vision is here, alive with us today, reminding one of Julia Kristeva's call for a 'signifying space,' a corporeal thinking in love with its own desire."-- Lucy Ives

"A duck is kidnapped from a park and placed on a sofa only to show up on the sofa next door. A speaker wonders in wartime whether to feed the zoo lions or let them free. Someone points out that you can hear the sound of the ocean, but not of individual waves. Ada Smailbegovic's work of deep relational concern allows me to dwell in 'joining occasions,' unfolding them with such delicacy that I can relinquish knowing if I am in the world or in a drawing of a world, in a dream or in a life, a war or a sentence where words regarding war touch. If reality occurs in a notebook of passing clouds, we see the traces smudge between the pages-- till the pluralizing realities bleed and mark us at all the edges."-- Eleni Sikelianos

Poetry.