Jugoslovenska Kinoteka

On January 30th, Shira Wolfe presents her debut poetry collection, Jugoslovenska Kinoteka, published by The New Menard Press, the UK imprint of HetMoet Publishing.

In Jugoslovenska Kinoteka, Shira Wolfe’s cinematic poetry reads like scenes from a movie, describing a period of her life spent in Belgrade and traversing the Balkans – from Sarajevo to the Bay of Kotor, from Stara Planina to Mount Avala. Most of all, it is an ode to the Belgrade of her past and the relationships she formed there, constellating around that city and continuously reappearing elsewhere in encounters fuelled by synchronicity. In her world, cities become smells; statues can be read; and the boundaries between art and life, between self and other, are always blurred.

Jugoslovenska Kinoteka is a bilingual edition in English and Serbian. The Serbian translation is a collaborative effort by Shira Wolfe and Marko Mladenović.

Shira Wolfe is a Dutch-American writer, poet and translator from Amsterdam. After completing her masters in International Performance Research, with a project about Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, she lived in Belgrade on and off between 2016 and 2021. She is the author of the self-published poetry trilogy Wider Than the Sky (2021), Wider Wings (2022) and Fallen Angel (2023), and contributed to the anthology Vreselijk verlangen. Een verzameling smachtende Mammoetjes (HetMoet Publishing, 2023). Shira leads poetry and writing workshops for asylum seekers in the Netherlands through the organisation De Vrolijkheid, and frequently collaborates with The Mystifiers, a socially engaged music collective. She is also a translator for the publication series Archival Textures.