Today's world is collapsing, and Concrete Is More Beautiful Disfigured and Stained is a record, a testimony kept for someone far in the future. With this collection, Snezana Zabic deliberately and forcefully pushes against the lyric tradition and leaves us haunted by the uneasy feeling that today's world is merely a future archeological site. These poems deliver to us Chicago, Yugoslavia, Europe, and more, as only a poet fully in control of the complexities and nuances of language can. They are time-traveling aircraft that transport us back and forth between worlds until we are as exhausted and disoriented as any immigrant. Though she eschews poetry claiming to offer deep epiphanies or universal truths, her work cuts to the heart of the malleability of the identities assigned to us through academics, family, and class. Identity, after all, is a slippery construct.