Zero Readership: An Epic

by Filip Marinovich

Poetry. "In his wily, edgy and hyperactive debut collection of thematically linked poems, Marinovich follows a prodigal grandson--ostensibly the poet--who returns to Belgrade, or 'Marinovichland,' over the course of five years. During each visit, the poet transcribes conversations and shapes them into 'typewriter portraits,' poems meant to be like family photographs. Opening with the darkly beautiful 'Belgrade Eyes,' Marinovich elegizes a relative who has committed suicide, unable to face 'twelve years of war.' Second-guessing his right to celebrate or mourn his own ethnic and familial history--'[w]ho are you to sing the dead you never knew?'--each poem comes closer to embracing the self-appointed role of bard journalist by addressing war and its aftermath in a removed albeit intimate 'befriend radiation--/ deal with traces of/ depleted uranium bombing/by NATO in '99.' Later, Marinovich points out ironies in the 'O look at this photo opportunity/ a Non-President jogging with a soldier with a prosthetic right leg.' Ranging from the highly political to the sweetly playful and tenderly sentimental, Marinovich, who is neither outsider nor insider in either of his homes, reveals that national identity can be fluid when 'from one side or another/ no one can be secure in the global cell"--Publishers Weekly, Sept. 2008.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published August 8, 2008

Reviews

[Amanda Lucek]

On "Zero Readership: an epic" by Filip Marinovich
"Review" by Amanda Lucek

A review in pieces: rather than try to collate the thoughts I've been typing up regarding this book into a single, fluid essay, I shall leave them disjoint. This seems especially appropriate for this book, which is itself made up of pieces that all form a whole, which shall be my first topic…


1) A BOOK IN POETRY FORM, NOT POEMS IN BOOK FORM

I started writing my thoughts on this book while I was still in the middle of reading it, and one of my initial jottings was that:
"It is difficult to tell where one poem ends and another begins. At one point the narrator is female, and then suddenly the narrator is male and I am left wondering where the switch took place. To be sure, this is not a book of unrelated poems, the way an anthology might be - certain elements recur again and again throughout the book, creating at least a dialogue between the pieces, if not an actual continuity. The standout image in the first half is of course the black suitcases (which are maybe actually dark blue) with the word "ORIGIN" written on them in white. (Washing machines, aliens, and dictionaries, to name a few items, are also links between poems, preventing them from being fully comprehensible as separate units.) But while all the pieces of the book seem to circle around the same center, I feel that they do so in different voices, and I was, personally, left feeling lost by not knowing who was telling the tale at any given point. Blank gaps on pages do not seem to indicate a separation between poems, nor do asterisks (in any of their various arrangements). Does a gap followed by a line in all caps indicate some sort of shift? Does a line in boldface? Why do some pieces start with dates and/or end with dates and not others?"
The more I read, however, the more I realized that this is not a selection of poems in book form, but a book in poetry form. None of the "pieces" stand alone. The photographs mentioned on page 89 refer to the same photographs mentioned in a distinctly different "piece" on page 81. The poem/piece on page 92 is definitely distinct from that on page 90 and yet both end with the same line, a line referring to keys which I personally did not understand until encountering the line yet again on page 122, where it is made clear that these are keys on a keyboard, not house keys or the like. The same characters recur throughout, and as I got more used to the format I found it easier to tell who was speaking at any given time (I decided, perhaps arbitrarily, to distinguish between "pieces" based on the lines in boldface, which I took as titles, and which sometimes included the name of that piece's main narrator).


2) STRANGENESS AND CONFUSION

Having just read the essay "The Good and the Not So Good" I feel compelled to include the following quote: "a poet should never be strange for the sake of being strange; the purveyor of such poems is at heart a sensationalist, and is insufficiently interested in the human condition." With Zero Readership we are presented with an author who is obviously interested in human suffering – his prolog is all about breadlines and bombings, suicide, impotent rage, poverty – but who strays farther and farther into the realm of the "strange" as Book I progresses (only to end Book I with a complete about-face, full of the "not strange enough", which I shall get to later), which does have the effect of clouding over sentiment with confusion. Some sense of confusion – of living in a world that doesn't make sense – may well be intentional, but my guess is that the average reader would get frustrated if they were to try to divine a grand design behind each passage here. Especially in my case, where I was given a week to read the book, I did not have time to spend an hour reflecting on the precise meanings of each page, and was instead left with general feelings induced – gut reactions – in place of careful, studied reflection. And sometimes that is the intent of a poem – to convey an emotion rather than a concept.


3) GOLDILOCKS AND STRANGENESS

So this concept of the "strange" is something that was hovering in my mind throughout my reading of the book. I couldn't help categorizing each part in my mind as I read it as though I were Goldilocks, for whom everything falls neatly into 3 categories: "too strange", "not strange enough", or "just the right amount of strange" (which is perhaps better stated as "strange and yet not strange at once") with the latter obviously being the pieces I held in highest esteem.
I find the best way to explain these categorizations is via examples culled from the text.
So for instance, the passage on page 104 that goes "inscrutable radiant surge/ my old love Barbara/ Horse, Enter, Eyes!/ Glue Intellectual Impulsive" is (to me) too strange.
The passage on page 73 wherein the question is asked "What would you tell the young in America's cities about resistance?" and is answered with "To fight for one better America -- less militant -- and more good-creating good-acting -- and in this way create a better life for themselves" is simply not strange enough.
The middle ground (which in this case is the higher ground) is achieved by passages that sound nonsensical on the surface and yet are decipherable. One example of this is on page 97 where it is said "poets only die quickly/ if they don't kill Santa Claus -- / kill at least one Santa Claus -- / you'll be alright!" It's fairly obvious that the meaning here is that poets, in order to succeed as poets, must destroy myths, they must reveal the truth, even though the truth is hurtful.


4) STRANGENESS OF FORMAT

So far I've given examples of strange phrases, but the strangeness of the book lies equally in its layout as well. Words scattered across the page, sometimes in large groups, sometimes all alone, often with gaps in the middle of lines and unpredictable amounts of space between lines. A few instances of words arranged vertically rather than horizontally. Some pages dense with text, some pages comprised mostly of white space.
The pieces of the book made up of bizarre and nonsensical jumbles of words match up with the erratic layout to give an overall sense of some free-floating consciousness (or sub-consciousness) meandering across the page from thought to thought. The pieces comprised of full, comprehensible sentences seem more at odds with the layout (for instance the passage on page 114 "Imagine how much food and medicine we could make for those who are dying/ if we took all war money/ and sent it to the dying" wherein the first and third lines are left-justified and the middle line is indented for no apparent reason).


5) REACTIONS (NOT REFLECTIONS)

One of the most firmly entrenched dichotomies in criticism is that between reaction and reflection. The good work (be it poetry, music, painting, etc.) inspires reflection – critical thinking that makes true human beings. The bad work is one that seeks to induce reactions – feelings that are imposed on us from the outside causing us to lose our very autonomy.
Personally I find these views to be a crock of you-know-what. A poem which causes sentiment is not something to be derided, nor even necessarily valued less than a poem which causes "enlightenment". I would not say they should be valued equally, but rather separately – as apples and oranges.
So, preamble aside, I mentioned earlier that I did not have time to fully reflect on all parts of the book, and thus my evaluation of it is based at least in part upon "gut reactions". Here I shall list a few such reactions:
Certain parts of the book put me off – induced nausea or repulsion. Phrases like "wet dream centipede" (46) or even the relatively innocuous "shave the barnacles off each other's faces" (45) were revolting if visualized. (Of course all this must be taken with a grain of salt, because there is often little rhyme or reason to what provokes me and what does not. Case in point: the meant-to-be-provocative first line of the book: "limbs on a church roof", was read by me with no feelings of disgust at all.)
Other parts of the book felt playful (i.e. "all things are portable in this age of rope" (52) or "'Mark, I'm in Belgrade getting the seat cushion hot before the keys and kneeling to ask her for Dictation, Assistance, Eggwhites.' 'Whoa --sounds progressive!'" (48)).
It is notable that the "mood" of each poem could turn on a dime, from, for instance, pure whimsy to absolute seriousness (an example of this is on page 52 when talk of vitamins and pirates suddenly is followed by the lines "having destroyed the view of oneself as really existing/ will US know it's war until we have to use rations?")


6) THE MOST PERPLEXING OF ALL

Passages such as "Launchpad agent thumbtack/ intercept radiant unguent/ frail hive bumble" may certainly seem perplexing, but for me the most perplexing passage of all was one that, on the surface, is very straightforward. I speak here of the text of page 86: "Despite the uranium/ in our food and water/ we are happier here/ in Belgrade/ than all of you in America/ with all your conveniences -- / dying a death of surplus -- / A HEAP OF/ SURPLUS GOODS/ BURYING YOU/ and your senses --" This passage is confounding simply because I don't know how to take it. In general, the various narrators in Zero Readership seem to speak frankly. The thoughts, nonsensical though they may be at times, are always sincere. But this passage sounds more like something someone would say out of jealousy, the way a spurned suitor may say "I'm happier without you anyhow". Even with the context of the rest of the book to aid me in deciphering the tone of this passage, I cannot decide whether the speaker here truly believes those words or merely wants to.


7) INTERPRETATION

Can I really go through this whole review without once expressing any thoughts on the meaning of it all? Well, yes, I could, but you would probably find such a review to be a sort of cop-out. So here's a few ideas. Obviously the book is about the NATO bombings of Belgrade during the Kosovo War in 1999. But instead of lamenting and despairing, the author is putting forth a "fuck you" and a "we will survive". On the last page he writes "would you like those bombs with uranium or without?/ Extra uranium please." This sense of sarcasm, while it does not dominate the whole book, is certainly one of its primary modes. The book also seems to issue the statement "I am not afraid" (one passage in particular stands out, wherein the narrator's girlfriend wants him to move away from a couch near a window to protect himself from potential shattering glass, but he is unconcerned) while at the same time being an act (the act of writing) that actually helps the author cope and makes his cries of "I am not afraid" more than just bravado.


8) THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS

On an end note, when speaking of poetry I like to state what my favorite lines or passages were – this really says more about me than it does about the book, but it gives a bit of positive flavor to a review wherein all other quoted passages are quoted not to illustrate merit, but rather to illustrate some other quality.


Dueling with the Dictionary

It says WE DEFINE YOUR WORLD
on the blue and red cover of
the Webster's New World Dictionary.

OH DO YOU?
Let's see…

THOU WRETCHED ENGLISH DICTIONARY
MEET ME WITH YOUR SECONDS THIS VERY DAWNING.
(page 93)



if he escapes to Greece
to be with boys half his age and play
lost tourist blissy mister
with them -- we will dismember him
and deposit his fragments
in ATM slots
and when the banker sees them he'll
cough and work on
but we'll be peacefuller than before
(page 50)



…
each dot of the threedot ellipses is the father the son the holy spirit
(page 57)

[Moose · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is clear even from the title of Zero Readership an epic by Filip Marinovich that this collection of poetry is not typical. The cover of the book, sketched in childishly messy, black, crayon-produced letters gives the impression that Marinovich is not interested in capturing the beauty of life. Instead, the white background with his black lettering suggests that, in a world that is at its base good, he seeks to highlight the unnecessary evil that marks up the face of it.
Several things about this collection of poems that I noticed immediately: first, the structure of the poems is what a traditional writer like myself would consider very strange. For example, Marinovich will start a new idea or thought in the middle of the page, he will end a thought halfway down a page and start on the next one, and he will use an entire line on one letter or a star in some places. He will also separate ideas in other areas with a string of stars. While all of these formatting styles serve a purpose, many of them were not clear to me until I was well into the book. For example, a string of asterisks in one part of the collection is revealed to represent barbed wire. Other formatting peculiarities are left to the reader’s imagination – perhaps an open parenthesis indicates an unfinished thought. This of course leads to questioning why the thought was unfinished, since it is clear that it is purposefully so. Perhaps the thought is still unresolved.
Secondly, the author uses descriptive and vivid imagery to get his ideas and points across; from the beginning line where we see limbs, presumably human, on a church roof to the idea of a hospital that was pillaged and patients that were split by a hammer. The imagery also displays less explicit scenes, such as the image repeated only early in the book of the Grandmother’s suitcase with the white ORIGINS phrase down the side of it. The imagery in this collection of poems serves to highlight the main themes, and probably stems from a mind full of suffering.
Thirdly, for much of the text, the author writes in a manner that is confusing enough that an average reader who is severely undereducated in abstract thought, history, and literature, such as myself, doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about. Perhaps the scattered ideas, sentence fragments, and seemingly unconnected thoughts serve to confuse the reader, thus conveying the feeling of the author at the time, who is still struggling to understand his own feelings. A particularly confusing point which I was able to pinpoint was does the author pretend to be a woman during the beginning stories, or is he speaking as someone else? He says us three gorgeous girls when talking about him and his sisters, yet later in the text he refers to having blueballs – a clearly male phenomenon. Perhaps the author himself is unsure of how to approach gender relations, which may be tied up in his desire for incest.
With that said, several themes do emerge throughout the text. They are as follows: Grandfather reading the obituaries. The sea (shaving barnacles off their faces, freediving with all the oxygen their lungs can hold) →(this leads to the theme of) space. He also commonly communicates with (or to) an Alien. This is similar to when he invokes and calls to the muse. He explains the ellipse dots are the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit (although he purposefully does not capitalize them as if to show his non-belief) and uses them throughout.
Throughout the jumbled mass of sentence fragments, images of seemingly random animals, and other jargon which in my mind converted to nonsensical crap, several actual themes and points do emerge. The author states that “As long as power is the way of solving the worlds problems, no one can be secure in the global cell.” This statement stems from both his own experience and the experiences of his relatives who he communicates with throughout the text – they have lived through the World Wars, the NATO bombings, the aftermath of the bombings including cancerous uranium poisoning, and other episodes of suffering and losses of human life. As a result of these experiences, the author seems to have a theme against the US, made especially clear during a section when he capitalizes US in many words that contain it. He believes the NATO bombs had premeditated targets, and that the civilian losses were calculated. These events are represented on the cover of the book by the black crayon marks.
Finally, the author voices his opinion on dreams - he mentions the dream in Baghdad, so he is somehow connected to the events there and he also talks about how dream may be warning you of a current situation or danger. He then goes on to say that “Education rips up your wizard sleeves. You travel to make new ones.” He traveled to the US at some point, and he hates America, he thinks people talk in monologues, and he wants to be a channel through which the universe celebrates itself in poetry. In my mind, his writing has a long way to go to get there.

[Zach Alterman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marino's words took me so many places; within my own memories of experiences, my ideas, his constructed worlds, and his real worlds. Yet my favorite place that I was consistently and happily taken to was his desk/space; kind of birds eye view looking at him typing or writing. I felt like I could see the look on in his eyes while he was letting his words flow out - his descriptions of his own writing resonated with me and brought me so clearly to those crazy and desperate and necessary and creative emotions.
' Typing is traction when you slide on wet night road mind'. I don't write much but I know that feeling of a creative endeavor being the only grip in certain moments and having no choice but hold tightly
'If you get unstuck and going
stop thinking and move with
the keys up and down, breathing
punching, pulsing: face jerk opprobrium'

"Heart palpatations go away
I'm having Art Palpitations
I must stay
in Belgrade morning ink
until im sane
enough to kiss the living room windowpane
Goodmorning." - so good.

The 'epic' nature of the poems was interesting to me and the collection of everything into a whole was impressive but more so for the coherent energy it created rather than the semi encoded narrative (which I don't really think was his main 'goal' anyways). I got the most out of fragments and their immediate resonances but this definitely was enhanced by general feeling the whole created.
there were some really beautiful images of the sun
"the sun burns on by celebrating itself"

'get out there and whirl on the balcony before daybreak changes into noon and the colors calm down becoming pedestrians again crossing the street and cavepainters probing plums, pointing at the sky digging up worms for sliding skypictures
beaks nearing them with no wings near
no feathers, plummeting from the daybreak crate split open by the burning wheel slices Belgrade open for twelve hours and sews it up with its disapperance and leaves a dark violet snailtrail for us to cool under with apple and construction site and the busted stone clock on the paratrooper club building I will repair when I whirl on the balcony with the wind electricity and light I generate I will even ride a giraffe to Mount Avala and burn my head on its peak so airplanes in fog can see not to slam into me.”

His poetry was so enlightening because although he consistently shook me with beautifully new and connective images they were based in the interaction between his ideas and his words - the idea of the sun being a burning wheel splitting a city in half for 12 hours is awesome but would have really not much effect if one were to say "hey isn't it crazy to think of the sun as a burning wheel thats splits a city in half for 12 hours"?
its this awesome symbiosis between the words and ideas just like playing a musical ideas spawn from the interaction between the player and the instrument rather than existing in some independent universe that is somehow translated through the instrument.
everything about his writing felt so natural yet crazy like those insects you see on the discovery channel that make you open your mouth as wide as your eyes because youre so happy you came across them because otherwise you'd have no experience like it.
I'd really like to meet this guy I feel something in common maybe thats what poetry is about is making people feel like that
this book blew my mind im excited to talk about it in class and i cant wait to read it again
"to compose something with the taste of experience in it!"
-haha and ^ that's what he did

[Rr Sigel]

I enjoyed delving into the language and imagery of Filip Marinovich’s , although I often found it difficult to trace the cohesive narrative strain. When, on page 103, the author brings William Carlos Williams into the conversation with his “blonde loverwoman,” I realized that, in spite of its very specific subject matter, Marinovich’s poetry sometimes reads like a series of Williams-esque images strung together, the threads of linear relation difficult to concretely trace. In some ways, this makes read like the observations of an adult looking at the world through infantilized eyes-- faced with violent conflict, political unrest, and the job of tracing the generations of his family, Marinovich’s narrator (whether speaking as himself or in the guise of another character) takes on experiences, perpetually new, that render his perspective as childlike as the charcoal-drawn art on the cover of the book. I continued to find this cover art interesting as I read through the book, with its three artistic characteristics-- charcoal/ash, fingerprints, and scrawled words-- mimicking what I saw as the chief narrative threads throughout the collection: Marinovich’s poems are centered around destruction (ash), piecing together identities (fingerprints), and the infantalization that comes from being the youngest generation to have to piece together such uncertainty (scrawling). Indeed, Marinovich’s narrator(s) straddle the line between learned twenty-something and a child’s unlearned analysis of the world around him: the image of a “talk fugue” (p. 17) specifically struck me as the merger between a complex idea (the fugal form - distinct from canon - actually makes sense in this case) and a simple observation that an adult, closed mind, is unlikely to categorize in the world around him. Later, Marinovich cements his infantilized state in the pecking order of his family with the line “I am 29 with a love for pink waterbottle caps Nada’s black suitcases and the necksuck Grampa Mercy gives me.” The narrative seems to shift towards more established and mature the further Marinovich gets from his family and Belgrade, as he formulates his own adulthood and his grandparents are rendered newly powerless back in Europe.

In general, I liked reading Marinovich’s collection, whose many voices-- unexplained and sometimes unintroduced-- read like a band recorded in total stereo surround sound (but all through the common intruding translation effect of a 29 year old man’s perspective), each speaking their piece and perspective from a different corner of the room, whose location is sometimes only determined halfway through their moments of voice. That said, aspects of it often felt self-indulgent to me: beautiful images that seemed to float without tie to the rest of the narrative thread allowed for interesting pause, but sometimes felt unjustified in the broader scope of the poem or book itself.

[Scout Larue]

I began this book not knowing anything about it but the cove, from which I could have gleaned much but chose not to. As My friend handed it to me after using my copy she had a look on her face that said, be careful with this. I not suppose I can understand this look. Zero Readership is full of dark and receptive imagery which only becomes more and more haunting as the story unfolds. Suicide and empty dreams abound there are only rare moments when the author decides to give the reader a break from the relentless pain of his experience and the experience of the family. Though I will admit that I have very, very recently finished this book and have not had as much time as I would have liked to reflect upon it before writing this review I feel I can confidently go off my state of mind as soon as I finished in order to write this. I was shaken and a bit sad but most of all this book had me inspired and pen blazing to pen some of my own tragedy, there is release in this book, the reader ( well I suppose this reader) can feel the weight of the words and the history as they would have pressed upon the author. I feel the release of each poem and of each repetition of balconies, suitcases, plums, suicides and bombs. It seems clear to me that the images that were repeated the most were probably the hardest for the author to overcome. I especially enjoyed the first poem, I was struck by the mixture of narrative pushing it forward along with the sort of free association. It was as if he was on one train of thought and was just so inspired by a word he had written that he was compelled to follow it to its end. This book was a little scary for me at times, I felt lost in a situation that I had never experienced but at the same time there were phrases like, "I am stuck in a dark blue blouse pocket of the sky like a forgotten vitamin-- take me! or I melt and stain your rising falling lipstick-marked chest--Treasure with your pirate gaptooth grin" that totally rocked me.

[Brandon Burke]

All in all I found Zero Readership very confusing, even more so at the beginning before i began to get a better understanding of the characters that the narrator repeatedly spoke about. It opens with a graphic scene of a family member of the narrator commiting suicide by jumping five flights down into a courtyard- i found this a little bit disturbing and very intense way to start a book. I realized from the beginning that the narrator was talking about the lives of his family members-his grandmother with her suitcases packed, his grandfather reading the obituaries, and his sister who he seemed to be infatuated with; but i did not realize that he kept leaving Belgrade and coming back each Summer until about 50 pages in when his sister says "who is this kid who comes around every other summer." I think that the narrator was a bit of an outsider to many of his family members. He speaks about family members that he has not seen in a long time that he thinks may be upset at him, and about how his sister doesn't recognize him. The book also speaks a lot about death, and how the narrators family was affected by what i think was a war in Belgrade. I think that many of his family members believe that he comes in the summers only to gain information and write poems about their lives, and leaves and makes money doing so. I also didn't realize until later in the book (i might have been slow on picking it up) that a lot of it was in a question and answer form. Like the narrator was interviewing his family members. Images that stuck with me throughout the poem, were the one of the family member jumping into the courtyard at the beginning because i was very surprised that the book opened that way, and (for no reason in particular) the schoolteacher "catching airplanes."

[Jcasper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chaotic and disjointed, Marinovich’s Zero Readership explores the narrator’s relationship with his family in the context of the 1999 NATO bombings of Belgrade. At first, the frenetic prose is confusing and abstract, as the spacing, asterisks and strange character names combine to obscure the poetry’s message in an almost nonsensical medley of harsh language and callous imagery. But eventually, as certain themes repeat and the context of the uranium bombings becomes clear, the chaotic language assumes meaning and establishes context for the work as a whole. While passages like “I am the ozoneless earth. Where did you hide my rind? My pulp rots in/ space” (29) frequently remind the reader of the cancerous results of the bombings, the overarching story does not fully come together as a unified, understandable one until A Typewriter Portrait of Grampa Mercy. A structured and coherent dialog, the passage both establishes historical context and the relationship between the narrator and his family, while the other family portraits brilliantly unite the themes of war and death with the nature of human interaction, coping mechanisms, relationships and marriage. These portraits make the poems personal and familiar while still frantic and chaotic, reflecting the nature of the bombing episodes and their cancerous effects. Although political attitudes appear throughout the book, I would have enjoyed learning more about the opinions toward Milosevic through Grampa Chaki. Yet ultimately, Zero Readership is a successful, albeit vaguely unapproachable epic that captures the feeling of post-war horror through the written word. Much more so than most, this book benefits from a second read, as the context slowly gained throughout the work enlightens each and every page.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Filip Marinovich’s “Zero Readership”, I found myself with more questions than answers (something I’ve recently been working to become comfortable with). I know next to nothing about Serbia, it’s surrounding territories, and it’s political history. Hell, as a Canadian, I barely know about America’s relationship with the area. However, even though much of this work focuses on the writer’s relationship with the area and its history, I found myself struck by vivid images and his interpretations of his own experiences. In part due to Marinovich’s disjointed writing style, I was rarely moved by entire poems, but instead, certain lines would jump out at me. Sometimes I could not figure out how these lines related to the rest of the work, but they seemed important to me nonetheless. “my connecting flight to Belgrade shaking God grabbed the plane with his sandbox hands and banged it from behind with his stormcloud cock I practiced doggystyle breaths strapped into my seat…” I quite literally had to stop reading for a few moments after that mouthful of words. Many times throughout the piece, I was impressed with the poet’s ability to begin an image in innocence, then seamlessly shift to horror (i.e. “”Zorana stayed up doing her math homework anyway by tomahawk green light flashes in her window and learned algebra in dust swinging up from Belgrade concrete, which is a curious furious mixture of blood, bombs, and human feet.”). Similarly, he often moves from wordplay into extended metaphor (i.e. the “star parts” sequence). Finally, I feel the need to comment that “wet dream centipede” is the most uncomfortable combination of three words that I think I have ever read.

[Sparrow .]

Young poets today seem to have no history. Instead, they have theories -- or perhaps "patterns of code." Their work promotes the environmental movement, for example. Many of them, I believe, are still deconstructing something or other. Filip Marinovich, however, does have a history, which is visible in his name. He's a Serbian, or more precisely an American grandson of Serbia (if I understand correctly). This book, despite its abstract title (and cover), is an exploration of Filip's ambiguous "homeland." (But what could he call it: "Serbia, My Serbia"?)

Serbia is a pile of involuted questions, some of which (like many questions) take the form of answers. Yugoslavia (whose capital was Belgrade, the largest city of Serbia) was the most successful Communist nation, most would argue. So Communism becomes a character in Zero Readership. So do the complex and horrific Balkan wars of the 90s.

I just opened to "Quotations from Irradiated Belgrade":

yr mother in '91
on the eve of Balkan

orange

quotations

My English
is not very goodnik!

(steel beams -- lines
skyscraper times
Babel Towers sliced
limes for cocktail Oceanside --)

...

Grandpa Mercy on Che --
"He was a real revolutionary
because he got rule,
gave up all the privileges of rule,
and went to Bolivia to
raise a revolt with the Indians."

Within battle-scarred Belgrade, Filip's Grandpa Mercy (what a name!) takes time to rhapsodize on heroic Che Guevara. Zero Readership displays the devotion of the heartfelt student, learning the bitter and invaluable lessons only a grandmother -- with "not very goodnik" English -- can teach. (That was just part 1 of the poem.)

Rarely do I feel about a book: "This story could only have been told in poetry." But that is my opinion of Filip's "epic."

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing book, in what it says and how it says it.

How it says: The text develops its themes with an network of repeated words, images, phrases, forms, and associations. Every page is a gridded plane of vertical and horizontal alignments. Idiosyncratic spacing develops associations between words on distant lines. Letters are sometimes aligned to the grid of the book's typewriter font and sometimes they break free. Each white space is as important as each letter, and they all collaborate as constellations in the text. The table of contents designates the final, blank-but-still-numbered page as "RESTPAGE". Best of all, the text's aggressive formal structure is tempered with clues for the reader. It directly addresses some of its numerical conceits, and in two places the poet writes vertically to make the text's second dimension clear.

What it says: Behind the text's mechanics a narrative emerges: of a poet troubled and fascinated by his Serbian family and the political upwellings beneath his family history. Themes include Zero, Serbian blueballs, the colors green and black, barbed-wire asterisks, ellipses and trinities, genocide and dirty bombs, family and the privileged conditions under which incest becomes possible, the responsibilities of a poet, the act of writing, the nature of the book and the relationship of that nature to memory or memorialization.

Form and content complement perfectly.

[Hannah Antalek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Filip Marinovich’s book of collected poems Zero Readership: An Epic tells the story of Maronovich’s struggle to confront and reconcile his relationship with his own family history in times of war and political unrest in Belgrade, Serbia.
In these connected poems Marinovich narrates in a deconstructed, post-modernist and nonsensical voice that is not immediately accessible nor is it readily understandable. The manner in which Marinovich writes is deeply autobiographical and includes vivid and specific imagery that at first feels overly obtuse. However, as the book progresses a pattern and repetition begins to emerge in Marinovich’s surrealistic world and an implied logic begins to evolve. Marinovich’s poems function almost as if they were a dream-sequence; juxtaposing a sense of concrete logic and knowledge of Belgrade against more abstract stream-of conscious associations brought on by real or imagined events. This style is particularly effective given the nature of his subject matter, which is in essence the notion of trying to understand a time and history that you were unable to experience while balancing your comprehension of the present. Marinovich struggles to piece together a holistic image of his family by weaving these fragmented memories and stories from the past together with his knowledge and experience of what has been immediately observable.

[Shay O'brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first experience reading a book of poetry from start to finish. At first, I felt lost and confused- I was sifting through so many sad images on the page and I couldn't figure out how to knit them together into something palpable. But then a few things made it feel real. First, on page 33, Marinovich wrote a poem about blood on my fifteenth birthday. Meanwhile in Texas, I was running three miles around a lake with Robbie Stewart, wishing all my friends hadn't picked that week to go to Christian camp. As I realized that Marinovich and I live on the same planet, in the same space-time continuum, his experience started feeling as real as mine. His recurring images began to build themselves up in my head- Wolfman, Grampa Mercy, the black suitcases- and then he wrote "dark blue packed suitcases not black/dammit poet work with the lights on." In the margins, I wrote, "that's it- you're real!" From then on, I felt like I was floating around in his own head, jumping from thought to experience to thought and back again. His dark, atmospheric portrait of Belgrade is something I won't be able to shake out of my ears anytime soon. God, that schoolteacher catching airplanes! Those "limbs on a church roof"! Not exactly a cheerful read, but definitely one I'm glad I experienced.

[Mikey]

I had trouble getting into the book because of the fragmented sentences and thoughts. Once I got the "typewriter portrait of grampa mercy" I began to engage more with the book because that section gave a more coherent picture through an interview like question and response format. Also as the book progressed images and ideas reappeared in the fragments and began to make more sense through their repetition, with views from slightly different angles. The author blends together images and ideas of war and place (Belgrade) and his experience writing. He thinks about his writing and uses writing as a grounding or as a way to release the awful that he sees that gets integrated into his thoughts, "coughs out a page or two and throws out the poison, accumulating in you". Particular images that stuck out for me were "the body parts propelled into the trees were removed by cherry pickers", and "typing is traction when you slide on wet night road mind".

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a reason why the book is called "Zero Readership." In fact, it is nearly impossible to read for most of the book. It is confusing, chaotic, and senseless at times. However, this changes about halfway throughout the book, and you gain some sense of what is going on. Does this redeem the 67 pages of jibber-jabber? Not in my mind. I realize why Marinovich gave such an epic account of the bombings of Belgrade - the people that experienced it had a real-life encounter of our reading experience. It was chaotic, nasty, not something that was easy. But turning that into a 130-page saga for a reader to understand is a tall task. He lost my attention early on because of this, and it was hard for him to pull me back in. This is my first real encounter with a book of poetry, so take this review as you see fit. Maybe on a second read in a few months I will be able to better understand what "Zero Readership" is trying to say.

[Helen S.]

This was a pretty good book. It was very powerful, discussing the destruction of a city both physically and in the mind of the author. The descriptions were very powerful, especially the one talking about breathing in blood-filled concrete dust while doing algebra. Not only does he discuss the literal struggle--the war--but also the struggle within himself after emmigrating. No matter what, he's still proud of his country.

[Filip Marinovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

3 reviews of "Zero Readership":

http://bostonreview.net/BR35.1/savich...

http://galatearesurrection13.blogspot...

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1...