Godspotting - by Aleksandar Hemon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Macarthur recipient's first collection of poetry embraces mortality and survival in the facer of global conflict and domestic threat.

Godspotting ponders and proclaims what it means to live, die, and survive in a world that "doesn't love any of us." Considering the fragility and utterly complicated nature of life, Aleksandar Hemon's deep contemplation of human mortality shifts between surrendering to the notion of death as a disappearing act, acknowledging the difficulty of living in the present, and accepting that this cruel world is still home to beautiful things. Celebrated for his fiction and nonfiction, Hemon here turns to poetry to interrogate the "shape and form" of joy, meandering through tender and complex memories of family members, his childhood, and the transitory moments he never wanted to end. This collection challenges typically religious understandings of death and what follows, teetering from curiosity to radical acceptance to despair about one's inevitable demise.

Sharp, reflective, and poignant, Godspotting explores the normalization of violence, new beginnings as a refugee, and Hemon's birthplace of Sarajevo. These poems illuminate the natural human desire to figure out one's place in the world before, during, and after life.

Review Quotes

Praise for Aleksandar Hemon

"Possessed of a phenomenal gift for translating feelings into concrete imagery in masterfully structured tales that end in stunning crescendos, Hemon infuses everything, from a freezer to bees in a hive, with barbed insights into our instinct for aggression, longing for connection, and unquenchable need to tell our stories, whether in poems, letters, drunken orations, or confessions to strangers. Hemon is a world-class writer of seismic depth, riptide humor, wine-dark language, and unflinching candor."--Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Hemon is immensely talented-a natural storyteller and a poet, a maker of amazing, gorgeous sentences in what is his second language."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Hemon displays a considerable command of sudden shifts in tone, shuttling swiftly but surely between black comedy and bleak reality."--Kirkus Reviews

"A charmingly discombobulated take on life and language. . . . Hemon makes ordinary occurrences read like psychic disturbances."--Village Voice

"You may feel nearly giddy with pleasure at how beautifully written, funny, and entertaining [these stories] are, and at the depths of tenderness and seriousness swirling beneath their wry, deceptively offhand surface."--Francine Prose, O, the Oprah Magazine

"His books are replete with the kind of memorable phrases that reviewers cherry-pick and offer to the reader. Here is an assortment from his new novel: a cat purring is 'revving his little pleasure engine'; a character presses 'his face against the window in the parenthesis of his hands'; elsewhere, 'leafless tree crowns scrambled the early morning light'."--Marcel Theroux, Guardian

About the Author

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles, as well as a co-scriptwriter for The Matrix Resurrections. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending a brief visit, but while there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. He started writing shortly thereafter and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter, and performs music as Cielo Hemon.