Ajla Dizdarevic’s debut poetry collection, What I Learned About Dogs in the Village, will be published in February 2027 by Carnegie Mellon University Press and is available for preorder now. The collection examines the long afterlife of the Bosnian War, tracing how violence, displacement, memory, and inherited trauma shape survivors and their children. Drawing on Eastern and Southern European literary traditions, Dizdarevic moves between family history and national history, using psychological portraiture, shifting landscapes, and surreal imagery to consider what is carried forward after war and what can never be fully recovered.
In the three poems below, Dizdarevic approaches that inheritance from distinctly different angles:
- “Dizdar” wrestles with cultural inheritance and conquest through language, food, the body, and the speaker’s own surname.
- “Dizdarević Mehmeda Sulejman” portrays the poet’s father as both a child shaped by Bosnia and a survivor permanently marked by war.
- “Ajla Dizdarević Has a Cold” uses fractured voices and dark humor to construct a portrait of a woman through rumor, memory, bureaucracy, friendship, and disappearance.
