The opening poem of the collection, “The Beginning of Cartography,” sets Knežević’s major themes and prefigures “the anguish of cartography” that later appears in “The River’s Name.” Here the poet lays out the terms of her postmodern artistic project by denying concepts of inherent value and material consequence:
To be a thing
without use value.
To be a thing that gains value over time
though no one knows why.
To let yourself be called
a decorative item.
To hear that you’re superfluous.
Poetry may make nothing happen but Knežević is not an aesthete. She addresses current political issues and evergreen topics such as parenthood and dying, poems that in other hands might feel Serious-with-a-capital-S. Knežević resists and subverts that course. “You curl up in fear of banality,” she writes, and her poems do seem to desperately avoid the banal—doing so, at times, by embracing banality.
“Cargo” explores the migrant crisis with an elliptical admixture that bobs between disparate registers from one line to the next. There are many political poetries of witness that employ heavy-handed symbolism, that borrow from the language of bureaucratic oppression, that humanize through spiritual empathy. But few poems attempt all of these at once, as if placing these modes of poetic posture in juxtaposition. The last stanza of the poem contains all the elements of the whole, from sarcastic declarations to overt political commentary to an elaborate spiritual image:
Since then everything’s wonderful on our plot!
Everyone has a personal niche, an ID number.
And what’s most important, the possibility
Of opening and closing as they wish,
Beginning with windows, screens, formerly
Intimate locks now public, right up to the one
That the rival tribe has named the soul.
In other poems, Knežević deploys banality for ironic effect, similar to the doublespeak of alt-right trolls, a smirking irony that uses the hyperbole for provocation, then scolds you for being offended. Consider this stanza from the poem “Bella,” about a stray dog who has just birthed a litter:
We named her Bella for the beauty
Of her cheerfulness that dwells only in the eyes
Even when other places of hope are extinguished.
We, who are slow to start crying —
Though often we’d give all our bones
For a good cry —
Noticing her as she staggered, barely alive,
We said softly all at once, “Auschwitz.”
And we released at least one tear
From the pits of our shackled eyes.
What to make of this? Godwin’s Law doesn’t typically have much bearing in a poetry review, but here we are. It seems we’re intended to read this as a satire. But typically there would be a clear object of subversion. I’m not sure what, exactly, this is satirizing. Potentially a stereotypical stoicism of the Serbian people? The bleeding hearts of animal lovers? It’s possible that I am misreading the time, misunderstanding the context, or missing a key point of reference.