Marija Skočibušić
- Croatia -
Marija Skočibušić (Karlovac, 2003) is a poet, critic, and essayist in the fields of literature and pop culture. She is currently a student of Comparative Literature and Swedish Language and Culture on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. She is the recipient of the Na vrh jezika award for her poetry collection Kraćenje razlomaka (Reducing Fractions, Jesenski i Turk, 2021), which also received an honorable mention in the competition for the Goran for Young Poets award.
The Poetry of Body and Language: The Poetic Work of Marija Skočibušić
The poetic voice of Marija Skočibušić, although young, has already firmly established itself as one of the freshest and most original in contemporary Croatian literature. Born in 2003 in Karlovac, Skočibušić studies Comparative Literature and Swedish Language and Culture, and has been actively engaged in poetry from an early age. She is the recipient of the prestigious “Na vrh jezika” award for her debut poetry collection Kraćenje razlomaka (Reducing Fractions, Jesenski i Turk, 2021), and her poems and literary criticism have been published in prominent Croatian and regional journals, portals, and anthologies. Her essays and critical text on contemporary literature and politics, focalized from a millennial, but self-aware, socially critical and feminist perspective, gain a lot of attention for their sharpness and directness.
At the heart of her poetic focus lies a complex relationship between body and text, explored through a formally and thematically bold approach. Even in her debut, Skočibušić demonstrates a remarkable level of artistic maturity—the ability to recognize and articulate the limits of her own expression while actively exploring and destabilizing them. In Reducing Fractions, one can detect a strong desire to merge linguistic reflection with bodily experience, while simultaneously rejecting narrative linearity and lyrical sentimentality. The growth of language and body, as the poet perceives it, is difficult to capture in words—thus the poem emerges as a space of hesitation, rupture, and departure.
Interestingly, the title of her debut collection already establishes a thematic and stylistic axis that extends throughout her poetic work. In mathematical terms, reducing fractions implies finding the greatest common divisor of numerator and denominator. If this concept is transposed into a poetic context, as Skočibušić does, the question arises: what is the greatest common measure in language—what balances its micro and macro structures? Is poetry, like a fraction, the result of a continuous process of reductive alignment, where excess is eliminated in favor of condensed clarity, or is it precisely in the excess—in what resists reduction—that subversive and resistant potential lies?
The collection comprises 42 poems divided into three sections, preceded by an introductory poem titled “Home”. Already in this opening piece, one finds key elements of the author’s poetics: a thematic preoccupation with the body, family relationships—especially the mother-daughter bond—and a critical approach to patriarchal patterns. Throughout the collection, a critical dialogue is conducted with tradition, linguistic norms, and identity. Many poems are programmatic, self-reflective, and aware of their performative nature. Skočibušić employs irony, linguistic digressions, alliteration, and Anglicisms, testifying to her conscious openness toward the dynamics of language in a digital and post-industrial context. Language is subjected to deconstruction—not destructively, but in a quest for an authentic expression capable of encompassing the reality of the contemporary female subject.
The speaker in Reducing Fractions is neither stable nor clearly defined. It oscillates between the infantile, the affective, the stubborn, and the introspective. Visual and linguistic motifs—such as milk teeth, umbilical cords, grammatical tenses (especially the aorist), worms, bellies, teeth, hair, and gynecological references—constantly point to the intersection of the personal and the political, the physiological and the discursive.
Her new manuscript Kolut naprijed (Forward Roll), a poetic project in progress, represents a further shift and radicalization of her aesthetic and thematic methods. The very title suggests an acrobatic, physical action that becomes a metaphorical axis for enacting the poetic process. Here, the “forward roll” is not merely a metaphor, but a choreography of the text—a movement involving momentum, transfer, jolt, return, and disorientation. It is an attempt to establish a new, provisional equilibrium within the text, in which textual and bodily dynamics constantly intertwine.
Marija Skočibušić’s poetry departs from dominant lyrical trends that rely on narrative and prosaic events. Instead, she turns to a minimalist, stylized language that frequently draws from medical or kinesiological registers—diagnoses, findings, exercise instructions—as the basis of poetic material. This language, displaced from a technical context into poetic space, unexpectedly acquires aesthetic function and generates meaning precisely through its supposed “non-poetic” nature. An ophthalmological report such as “The anterior chamber is of medium depth and clear” becomes not merely a description but a verse that opens up a space of affect and embodiment.
What the manuscript Forward Roll further emphasizes is the conscious erasure of boundaries between the lyrical subject and the author, between the internal voice and the external instance. The body that appears in the text is not metaphorical but materially present, and the speaking subject is not stable but porous, infantilized, wavering, at times spoiled, stubborn, or greedy. The subject is thus shaped by conflicting discursive forces, and the poem becomes a space of tension, constant displacement, and textual acrobatics.
One of the important aspects of the manuscript is its engagement with performativity. Several poems employ graphic elements and blank spaces, and at times black rectangular blocks obscure parts of the text—suggesting an excess that suffocates meaning, yet simultaneously opens up a new night, a space of the unknown, potentially liberating. In this sense, Skočibušić’s poetry is a form of play—but a serious one—in which stability of expression is sacrificed for experimentation, movement, and possibility.
Irony, fragility, and strength—all are elements woven through her poetry. In the contemporary context, her voice acts both as an extension of and a departure from tradition, moving toward what could be called a poetic choreography of failure—not because it fails, but because it refuses to conform to expectations.
Her poetry is not simple, but precisely through its complexity, fragmentation, and inverted corporeality, it reveals a new kind of lyrical intensity. Her texts are not there to say, but to show how to speak; not to comfort, but to destabilize; not to offer identity, but to dismantle it.
Her poetry refuses any functionalism. Her texts are not meant to please, affirm, or console. Instead, they push the boundaries of the poetic, examining power, body, language, gender, and identity. The structure of her collections is not linear but develops in jolts and repetitions—like the forward roll itself, which is always attempted anew.
Her authorial stance is not experimentation for its own sake, but a deeply considered one, with clear socio-critical potential. As one critic noted, one might assume she is older than she is—not because youth excludes depth, but because her poetic voice has been unusually articulate, thoughtful, and daring from the beginning.
At a time when many poetic voices remain in the realm of the safe and familiar, Marija Skočibušić chooses the path of a poetry that cannot be tamed. The poems in Reducing Fractions and Forward Roll dismantle predictability—not for the sake of chaos, but in search of the “greatest common measure” between language and experience. This expression could serve as a metaphor for her poetics: calculated yet passionate reduction of excess, not to leave bare form, but to open space for feeling, thought, and resistance.
In her poems, an unusually mature voice emerges, and something truly literary occurs: the reader is displaced, destabilized, yet also liberated. And that is what makes her poetry significant—not just as an artistic experiment, but as a space where language and body, thought and feeling, the political and the intimate, meet without compromise.
In this sense, the poetic evolution of Marija Skočibušić represents one of the most exciting and refreshing voices in contemporary Croatian poetry. Her work clearly demonstrates that poetry can still be a place of resistance, experimentation, play, and embodiment—a space where body and text meet not to merge, but to continuously hover around each other in tension.
Poetry
-
*** / ***
-
*** / ***
-
*** / ***
-
*** / ***
-
*** / ***
-
*** / ***
-
*** / ***
-
*** / ***
-
*** / ***
-
*** / ***
