Alen Hamza immigrated to the United States from Bosnia-Herzegovina as a refugee at the age of fifteen. He has received fellowships from the Michener Center For Writers, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the University of Utah. His work has appeared in AGNI, Fence, and The Southern Review.

Books by Alen Hamza:

Other poems on the web by Alen Hamza:
Five poems
"Little by Little"
"Eternal Monday"
"Camping Trip"
Three poems

About Twice There Was a Country:

"Twice There Was a Country explores Hamza's identity as a Bosnian refugee attempting, and equally resisting, to assimilate to the cultural politics of the United States. Hamza's poems are playful and often surreal; their examination of how language shapes both our political and cultural identities is timely and nuanced. Here, the legacy of wartime trauma is approached with an ironist's touch and a fabulist's sense of play, paying exquisite attention to the ways in which both English and Bosnian get used—or misused—by speakers desperate to remake but also preserve their sense of self. '[I]n the end I realize I really wanted / to be a poem,' Hamza writes, and it is in the beauty of these poems that the many contradictions inherent to the immigrant's identity come to life."
—Paisley Rekdal

"Alen Hamza is a lyric poet of the first order, and Twice There Was a Country proves it with poems that alchemize past and present, personal and political, and grief and celebration in a way that leads to absolute stillness: 'Silence has a mother in it and summer / refuses to move on.' Throughout this volume, Hamza acts as an Adam of sorts, naming people and places and events with the exactitude that allows him to reclaim all that was ever lost: 'Those under us are not dead. / They are dancers. We are the music.' This is a brilliant debut."
—Jericho Brown