Rise in the Fall is Ana Božičević’s second full-length collection, a revolutionary book and an ars poetica for the polis in which she excludes nothing - even nothing. Navigating literary history, gender, sexuality, economics, family, friends and lovers, she is at ease deploying and subverting the universal political statement and the lyric "I". A Croatian émigré, Božičević approaches the English language with a playful objectivity, bouncing back and forth from the conversational to the grand: "This is the whitest shit / I've ever written" she notes in her half-myth "About Nietzsche." Her critique of our time and place is at once empathetic and crude, tender and grotesque. Lucky for us, "beauty [wins] in all its casual terror and pain."