Roller-Skating Notes

Teleported across the Iron Curtain, Živančević 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 Žižek; 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