Aljaž Koprivnikar
- Slovenia -
Aljaž Koprivnikar (1987, Slovenia) is a poet, critic, translator, editor, and literary organizer. His poetry has been published in Slovenian and international literary magazines and anthologies and translated into multiple languages. His debut collection Anatomy (2019) was published in Greece (Vakxikon), Slovenia (Center za slovensko književnost) and Honduras (Editorial Efímera). In 2023, his poetry appeared twice in German translation, first at the Hausacher LeseLenz festival and later as Kleine Anatomie: Gedichte (A. Dielmann Verlag). A Czech translation is forthcoming. As a literary mediator, he translates, edits, and organizes festivals and events across Europe. He is vice-president of the Slovenian Literary Critics Association, represents PEN Slovenia’s Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, and directs Fabula Festival, Versopolis, ThinkPub, ArtAct and NovelEU. He collaborates with Berlin’s Lettretage and serves as program director of Prague Microfestival. Actively engaged in the literary world, he divides his time between Ljubljana, Berlin, Lisbon, and Prague.
The poetry of Aljaž Koprivnikar unfolds in a state of permanent in-between: between movement and rest, intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. His poems are inhabited by a subject that rarely settles, drifting instead through cities, languages, memories, and bodies, registering the world through a heightened sensual attentiveness. Sounds, colours, fleeting encounters, and fragments of everyday life enter the poem only to be destabilised by an opposing impulse—a longing for silence, for solitude, for a pause in the dizzying circulation of experience. It is precisely within this tension that Koprivnikar’s poetic voice takes shape.
Intimism and existential inquiry form the backbone of his work, yet they are never confined to the private sphere. The inner life of the subject is persistently exposed to the pressures of history, politics, and contemporary social reality. Emotional states are inseparable from spatial frameworks: cities become extensions of the body, landscapes function as mnemonic devices, and geography turns into a map of affect. The poetry thus performs a constant negotiation between the biological, the emotional, and the political, suggesting that identity is neither stable nor singular, but assembled from layers of memory, inheritance, and displacement.
A central motif in Koprivnikar’s work is distance—between individuals, between generations, between the self and the structures that shape it. These distances generate inner tensions marked by anxiety, alienation, and melancholy, but also by moments of fragile connection. The recurring anatomical metaphor, most clearly articulated in his larger cycles, operates as both method and worldview: the poem becomes a site of dissection, where family history, childhood, intimacy, and collective trauma are examined with surgical precision. Yet this dissection never leads to cold abstraction; it remains grounded in vulnerability, tenderness, and an acute awareness of loss.
Migration, both literal and symbolic, constitutes one of the most pronounced axes of Koprivnikar’s poetry. The poetic subject appears as a figure in motion, shaped by crossings, borders, and temporary dwellings, navigating a Europe marked by war, refuge, and neoliberal precarity. These themes enter the poems not as slogans or moral statements, but as lived realities, filtered through personal experience and embodied perception. Multilingual passages—shifting between Slovenian and other European languages—function as gestures of openness, affirming the universality of human experience while simultaneously exposing the fractures within it.
Alongside this outward gaze, Koprivnikar’s poetry also turns critically toward the cultural space it inhabits. The Slovenian literary and social environment is depicted as both intimate and suffocating, a space of longing and repetition, where desire and resentment coexist. In satirical cycles, literary life itself becomes the object of poetic scrutiny: its rituals, hierarchies, and mechanisms are exposed with sharp irony. This self-reflexive gesture does not seek exclusion, but rather a conscious distancing—a refusal to accept inherited norms without examination.
Formally, Koprivnikar’s poetry embraces fragmentation, hybridity, and tonal shifts. Lyrical passages coexist with documentary elements, scientific language, and historical references; tenderness collides with sarcasm, nostalgia with analytical distance. The poem often positions itself as an unstable structure, a process rather than a finished object, mirroring a world in which identities are provisional and moments are procedural rather than monumental.
Ultimately, Koprivnikar’s work resists the temptation of grand generational declarations. Instead, it offers a precise and intimate cartography of lived experience at the beginning of the twenty-first century—one shaped by mobility, uncertainty, and the erosion of stable frameworks. His poetry speaks from within this condition, insisting on complexity, ambiguity, and the fragile persistence of the human voice amid the noise of history.
Excerpts from Literary Critics and Forewords of Editions
“The author’s physical fragmentation across different European countries is the starting point of the poetry collection Anatomy. The places, cities, and landscapes outlined in the book are not merely geographical concepts, but intertwined points of identification for the poetic subject. Inventories of intimate experience and a personal search for identity unfold into a universal human experience, in which the poet proves himself a skilful weaver of complex life stories and intimate encounters. All of this is filtered through the prism of contemporary historical reality—the uncertain and turbulent conditions of neoliberal Europe at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.” — Domen Slovinič, foreword to the Slovene edition of Anatomy
“Este es un vibrante libro de poesía: experimental, profundo y sarcástico. En pugna con el orden establecido y en disección permanente de la soledad y de las feroces intenciones que afila a escondidas la ternura. Condensa magistralmente la crónica negra y el recuento de la nostalgia, de las cifras que sostienen la confusión o los datos sobre los procesos químicos que hacen polo a tierra al explicar el sentimentalismo y la incomprensión. Una poesía creativa que habla del mundo interior y sus fantasmas: la infancia, la parentela, los amigos, o simplemente un devenir verbal donde el poema es el principal sospechoso de eso que “está en tu aliento, que yo respiro. Está mi vacío, que te devora.” Pero también el libro es un asomo parafernalio a los límites de la percepción donde las identidades son amputadas y los instantes no son actos vitales, sino procedimientos, métodos y fórmulas para fabricar una falsa luz que disfrace la realidad de nuestro infierno social.” — Foreword to the Spanish edition of Anatomy
“In the last decade, I have already seen the odd proclamation of a poetry collection of the generation, supposedly the ultimate reference point of poetry of its millennials. But none of the above, regardless of its relevance, managed to address me as such. When reading Anatomy, I finally have the feeling that I have in my hands a collection that actually touches that part of the generation with which I myself had the most social ties. Therefore, whenever I try to better understand this part of my youth, which was once considered the most vital part of life, I will probably reach for this book or offer it to anyone who is interested in how the world was being experienced by our social group, without having to resort to the pompous phrase “voice of the generation”, even though I have it at the tip of my tongue.” — Muanis Sinanović, excerpt from Vrabec Anarhist
“Der Dichter und Literaturkritiker Aljaž Koprivnikar wurde 1987 geboren, in einer späten Aprilnacht in Ljubljana, wie es über ihn heißt. Als Literaturkritiker arbeitet er regelmäßig für verschiedene slowenische und internationale Literaturzeitschriften und Webseiten (darunter Literatura, Delo, Versopolis Review, Radio Ars, Psi vino, Plav). In seiner akademischen Forschung konzentriert er sich vor allem auf künstlerische und literarische Strömungen zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. In seiner Freizeit füllt er gerne, wie er selbst sagt, mit schwarzer Tinte die leeren weißen Flächen kleiner Notizbücher, die er immer an einem bestimmten – und immer demselben – Ort kauft. Er mag den Dual, als die slowenische grammatikalische Besonderheit und als Metapher der Zweisamkeit, ebenso gern wie die Einsamkeit bei Rilke. Seine Gedichte wurden in zahlreichen slowenischen und internationalen Literaturzeitschriften und Anthologien veröffentlicht und ins Kroatische, Tschechische, Deutsche, Griechische, Englische und Serbische übersetzt. Derzeit lebt er in Ljubljana und Prag, war allerdings auch schon länger und gern in Berlin und in Lissabon. Wer so viel macht und so schön schreibt wie er, der muss in einer Mischung aus Nostalgie und Liebe zum Fado leben – seine Gedichte sind Glanzstücke einer neuen, queeren Poesie.” — Matthias Göritz, foreword to the German poetry selection
Poetry
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Anatomy / Anatomija
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I. / I.
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II. / II.
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III. / III.
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IV. / IV.
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Everybody that falls into the arms of love, should instantly be hanged. / Vsak, ki pade v naročje ljubezni, bi moral biti v trenutku obešen.
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IV. / IV.
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... / ...
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VIII. / VIII.
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38° 44' 13.0056'' N 9° 8' 33.6660'' W / 38° 44' 13.0056'' S 9° 8' 33.6660'' Z
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… / …
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52° 31' 12.0288'' N 13° 24' 17.8344'' E / 52° 31' 12.0288'' S 13° 24' 17.8344'' V
