Cuvaj se’s Heather Derr-Smith went to Northern Bosnia next for workshops at the American Corner in Bihac. Floods were once again threatening the region, but luckily the waters receded and the Una river flowed its magnificent blue. Students read work by Jericho brown, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Ilya Kaminsky; Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones” and for Ramadan, US-Pakistani-Kashmiri poet, Fatimah Asghar, Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar, Adonis, Bosnian poets, Selma Asotic, and fiction by Faruk Sehic, “Quiet Flows the Una” Amila Kahrovic-Posavljak’s “Smrtova Djeca” and Velid Beganovic Borjen’s “Residue in Public Tea and Coffee Cups” and for the finale, a poem by Adrienne Rich.
Students made flower crowns, wrote lines of poems on colored ribbons of childhood memories, wrote lines from Faruk Sehic’s work which Derr-Smith will embroider into a quilt for him, and wrote lines of poems about water and rivers and floods on deep blue ribbons that were draped around the classroom and from the stacks of books.
Cuvaj se: Poetry of Possibilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina 