"Please read this NOW. It's brilliant."

—Tim Peterson, Mappemunde

In his wily, edgy and hyperactive debut collection of thematically linked poems, Marinovich follows a prodigal grandson—ostensibly the poet—who returns to Belgrade, or “Marinovichland,” over the course of five years. During each visit, the poet transcribes conversations and shapes them into “typewriter portraits,” poems meant to be like family photographs. Opening with the darkly beautiful “Belgrade Eyes,” Marinovich elegizes a relative who has committed suicide, unable to face “twelve years of war.” Second-guessing his right to celebrate or mourn his own ethnic and familial history—“[w]ho are you to sing the dead you never knew?”—each poem comes closer to embracing the self-appointed role of bard journalist by addressing war and its aftermath in a removed albeit intimate manner: “befriend radiation—/ deal with traces of/ depleted uranium bombing/by NATO in ’99.” Later, Marinovich points out ironies in the U.S.: “O look at this photo opportunity/ a Non-President jogging with a soldier with a prosthetic right leg.” Ranging from the highly political to the sweetly playful and tenderly sentimental, Marinovich, who is neither outsider nor insider in either of his homes, reveals that national identity can be fluid when “from one side or another/ no one can be secure in the global cell.

—Publishers Weekly, Sept. 2008

Scenes from ZERO READERSHIP :

" I am super conservative when it comes to space station hygeine"
" the voices I hear in my washing machine as I paint them"
" I think of your Belgrade as a different social notation"
" Then we went to Black Grass"
" to get laid like ink"
" the trams taken through Belgrade during the war when tramrides were
free"
" Belgrade in a crater"
" emails of the dead! Writing you from their text pads"
" Hooray! What is time to us but a picture of space"
" halibut objurgate pjs"
" We guzzle water straight from the
bent sirens.
zing!"
" I can't study philosophy--It's disgusting--
I found a hair in my textbook!"
" and give my regards to my head when you see it in the lettuce!"

Filip Marinovich is a poet living in New York. ZERO READERSHIP is his first full-length book of poetry. Poems have appeared in 6x6, New York Nights, Greetings, EOAGH#3, Critiphoria, and Penn Sound. Plays were written for and performed at Medicine Show, The Present Company Theatorium, and The Red Room. His paintings are hanging in his apartment and other apartments and were shown at Columbia's Postcrypt Art Gallery. Schools have been graduated (Columbia BA 2001, Columbia MFA 2007.) Performances have been given at The Poetry Project at St. Marks, Dixon Place, HOWL Festival, Bowery Poetry Club, Unnameable Books, and The Old American Can Factory. Filip is currently working on more poetry.

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photo: Nathaniel Siegel