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Tatiana Zima

TATIANA ZIMA

Program Bio
March-April 2007: University of Mississippi Oxford and New York
Back to More Open World Past Participants in Literature

Tatiana Zima is a poet and kulturträger or "culture promoter", as she calls herself. Born in 1968 in the port of Vanino, she currently lives in Vladivostok, a city in the Russian Far East. She has been extensively published by local and national literary magazines, and is the author of the award winning book Brackets (Skoby), published in 2004. She is also a publisher of the Vladivostok alternative poetry collection Fishes and Birds in 2006.

In her own words:
I was born in the year one thousand nine hundred and leap
on the second Sunday in March
while the sun shone and light snow fell.
My formation: ovule and spermatozoid.
As a rule, everything starts for me
where it ends for others.
I adore cats as a class
because all of them are poets.
I believe there are no low words
but there are low people.
I’m an aesthete to my bone marrow.
For me poems are the only path
to reconciliation with reality and
the only form of existence.
My feelings cannot be hurt.
Everything in life worries me
and the rest doesn’t worry me at all.
Every day I think about dying.

Links
  • Read her poetry online at Vavilon.ru and on Polutona