Ada Smailbegović’s debut collection, The Cloud Notebook, is long poem that unfolds from the narrative instability and fracturing that occurs from experiences of forced displacement and war, 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 living in a series of geographical displacements between Providence, Vancouver and New York. She is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, nonhuman forms of materiality, histories of description, and the natural sciences. She is a cofounder of The Organism for Poetic Research. Select critical and poetic works have included "Of Poodles, Mockingbirds and Beetles: Gertrude Stein's Zoopoetics" (College Literature, 2019), "From Code to Shape" (differences, 2018), The Forest / On Waiting (Doublecross Press, 2017), "Cloud Writing" (Art in the Anthropocene, 2015) and "Of the Dense and Rare" (Triple Canopy, 2013). Her book Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds was published by Columbia University Press in 2021.