Disintegration and Durability
Concrete Is More Beautiful Disfigured and Stained
Snežana Žabić
Match Factory Editions, 2025
To establish their legacy, people build any number of statues and monuments, convinced that these objects will outlive them. The twenty-six poems in Snežana Žabić’s thought-provoking collection, Concrete Is More Beautiful Disfigured and Stained, however, question whether it’s really possible for people to create anything permanent. In Žabić’s poems, concrete crumbles, monuments fall, and nations, like her native Yugoslavia, disappear. But rather than approach these inevitabilities with cynicism, the speaker in this collection embraces disintegration and its many generative possibilities.
The tension between disintegration and durability is best seen in Žabić’s poems about nature. Throughout these works, nature easily destroys man-made things. In “Mornings,” “[k]udzu vines creep up/looted old mansions,” and in “Rock Statues,” “the lake laps up” man-made beaches. Importantly, though, every time that nature erodes something, it leaves something new in that place. We see this through the vivid imagery in “Fable.” The “deep red” fox melts the snow as he walks through a city, which makes a new “path/for the neighborhood wildlife.” His actions stand in contrast to the dreary town that’s otherwise filled with an “abandoned/dormitory” and “a concrete/obelisk/graffitied on the bottom.”
At times, Žabić’s poems suggest that embracing disintegration can be subversive. This is especially true in her poems about urbanity. Notably, the speaker repeatedly confesses that she believes “concrete is more beautiful disfigured and stained,” a provocative statement that runs counter to our usual expectations about beauty. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that she captures cities full of rundown balconies, stairwells splotched with decaying food, and elevators that stink of “burned plastic.” While these settings are interesting by themselves, Žabić deepens her exploration of them by showing how everyday people disassemble these urban spaces, despite the wishes of those who designed them.
For instance, in “The Unemployed of the World,” the speaker derides those architects who stood “in checkered suits,/poring over blueprints” when they designed her building. Their efforts seem almost silly given that the building’s residents “intervene/in their design with our desires, retinas,/and glitchy nervous systems.” This refashioning is a subversive process, one in which the residents leech some power from the upper class, the same way that they slowly erode the building simply by living in it. Thus, Žabić ties notions of disintegration to class in novel ways that challenge our perceptions about ownership.
While Žabić’s poems interrogate disintegration on a thematic level, they also try to capture it on a formal level. Žabić’s poetry is matter-of-fact and eschews lyricism, but her poems are still playful and nuanced. Works like “Too Many Memories in Tatters” capture the speaker’s faded memories of Yugoslavia, for instance. While trying to clean up her leaking washing machine, she fails to “remember[r] the English idiom for .” The blank space is visual proof of Žabić’s disintegrating memories of her first language, a technique that she uses elsewhere in this collection. I also couldn’t help but think that the blank space made the poem more poignant and honest, the same way that gouged concrete appears more beautiful, and therefore real, to the speaker.
For all the collection’s interest in disintegration and durability, though, there’s often tension between what the speaker knows will crumble, and what she hopes to save. We see this in “Goodbye, 20th Century,” when she admits that she tries to “preserve” a crumbling Chicago through her writing. While the speaker believes that material “things” such as buildings and statues will eventually fall apart, she nevertheless believes literature can prevent such erosion. I found this interesting, especially since literary works often outlive their authors, so they create the very legacy that the speaker seems skeptical of throughout these poems.
But the speaker addresses this, in a roundabout way. She doesn’t envision her word as ironclad, nor does she believe that she’s provided readers with a definitive outlook on the world. Instead, as she notes in “June 10, 2020” she hopes her poems live “on a page or a screen in poor people’s hands when/ a break is needed.” In other words, the speaker’s poems are the most potent in brief periods of time between actions. Her poems bring comfort, but they will also shift under the hands of each reader, the same way that buildings are remade by their residents.
Ultimately, this prismatic exploration of disintegration makes Concrete Is More Beautiful Disfigured and Stained a fascinating read. Žabić looks upon the world with contagious curiosity, and her collection compels us to not only interrogate durability, but to think deeply about materiality and value. Above all else, Žabić’s poems are thoughtful reminders that when something falls apart, something else will simply take its place.
This review has been edited for style.
Emily Hall (she/her) is a freelance writer with a PhD in contemporary Anglophone fiction. Her book reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in places such as Necessary Fiction, Portland Review, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, MER, and Heavy Feather Review. Her creative prose has appeared, or is forthcoming, in places such as Passages North, Cherry Tree, Blood Orange Review, The Plentitudes, Does It Have Pockets? and 100 Word Story. She’s a prose editor for Pictura Journal, and she lives in NC with her husband.