"Andrea Jurjevic's Small Crimes begins during the Croatian war years of the early 1990's. In the midst of bombings sniper shootings and firing squads the speaker of the poems manages to live an almost normal adolescence thanks to her grit her attachment to family and her skepticism. The book then moves to the postwar years and onward into America which is not without its own perils. This is a collection that is often dark but just as often beautiful. Jurjevic's language crackles with energy and she lingers lovingly over the intimate details of a life that is lived with the eyes wide open. --C. G. Hanzlicek Philip Levine Prize judge

"The title of this haunting and elegant book is ironic and deeply understated. I expect irony became a way of life a reality ever-present in the up-turned world the war and dissolution of the former Yugoslavia at the root of these almost unrelenting poems. And the understatement is almost necessary as darkly comic ballast for the weight of the narrative facts. Almost because countering the violence and grief in the near and distant history behind these poems is an aching cry of passion a claim for the love in human life that restores and sustains that life to give it meaning beyond the moment beyond the privations and despair of present time. In that implicit song of love one finds hope transcendence and any reader of this painful book of serious artistic verse will conclude the love discovered here is earned and at once miraculous. This book reminds us that life in all its iterations is utterly shocking and beautifully defiant." - -Maurice Manning

"I love the way in Andrea Jurjevic's poems beauty and horror walk arm-in-arm the way each poem is dense cacophonous with images complex and layered as a Kusturica film the way I want to look away sometimes and can t. I love the way she takes me through her poems to the human underside of the war in her native Balkans and to the underside of America and to the underside of love. I love the wrecked love poems most of all for their brutal tenderness for what survives." --Cecilia Woloch