Category: Nina Zivancevic

by Nina Zivancevic

In Death of New York City: Selected Poems, Nina Zivancevic’s writing straddles two major cultural groups (American/English and European/non English) using English as her medium. Fluent, and having written in her native Yugoslavian, as well as French and English, she is able to bring a wider scope of linguistic references with which to apprehend the psychological and physical phenomena that inform her writing. Nina Zivancevic lives up to her international reputation as one of the foremost living poets of her native Yugoslavia from which she has won numerous prestigious awards since an early age. For this work originally written in English, in his forward, Charles Simic an expatriate and major American poet writes, “Nina Zivancevic is one of the most original poets writing in Europe in the last twenty years…The genius of her art lies in her ability to make surprising connections between diverse cultures and literatures giving her poetry a richness and range that is truly rare.

by Nina Zivancevic

Teleported across the Iron Curtain, Zivancevic sounds the hidden alienation of a language on the brink, of mantras of the unsayable compulsively disgorged in lieu of a politic of linguistic refuge. Poetry is not, as Adorno claimed, impossible after Auschwitz, any more than it is impossible after the Soviet Union or the present drowning of the planet in commodified junk, but the contrary: such catastrophes make language possible in its critical poetic aspect.- Louis Armand

In this book Nina Zivancevic is a stand-up poet in the true tradition of the great stand-up comedians, like Lenny Bruce, for instance, like Groucho Marx. But she’s more than that! When Nina Zivancevic’s says in her poem, Active Artists Reforming Action, “No, I’m not an Anarchist/My grandfather did it for me…,” then you’re really in the presence of someone whose every poem is an assault on the senses, a bullet to your ears.”- Gerard Malanga

This transnational writer reflects on her current life in Paris, France and the situation with migrants, her past in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and its civil war, as well as New York, US and its problems with gentrification. But she also speaks regarding other current or past events, like the civil war in Syria, and Afghanistan. We delight in her reflections on ancient Greece; philosophers like Nietzsche, Freud, Hannah Arendt and Zizek; painters and composers like Chagall, Chopin, and Liszt; and even drug lord, El Chapo Guzman.”- Biljana D. Obradovic, Xavier University of Louisiana

As usual, Nina Zivancevic’s poems do a bunch of things I’ve been trying to figure out for years. She is basically the master mathematician of ideas translated into poetry.- Malik Ameer Crumpler, author of Beneath the Underground, Collected Raps