The Cloud Notebook

Ada Smailbegović

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. Rendering spaces of waiting, suspension, and a kind of fractal recurrence in which the fragment is held, revisited, and re-performed in memory, Smailbegović explores how languages and objects come to compose worlds, as well as to carry traces of dislocated and disappearing worlds. The poem assumes what Sara Ahmed refers to as a "migrant orientation" as a continuous problematic of narration or representation. Deftly dissolving the seam between language and sensation, material and thought, The Cloud Notebook is at once playful, probing, elegiac, humorous, and ceaselessly, spellbindingly metamorphic. 

Ada Smailbegović is a poet and theorist born in Sarajevo and currently living in Brooklyn. She is an Associate Professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, ecologies of displacement, nonhuman forms of materiality, histories of description, and the natural sciences. In 2021 her book Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds was published by Columbia University Press.