With his debut poetry collection, Poems of an Unknown Anarchist, Nikolai Jeffs enters Slovenian poetry with a direct, political, and cosmopolitan voice that resists both literary elitism and cynicism.
Jeffs, one of the pioneers of postcolonial theory in Slovenia, explores questions of capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, the climate crisis, migration, and social inequality in his poetry. Yet his verses are not simply theory transposed into poetry. At their core lie the other person, solidarity, community, and the possibility of a different world.
Poems of an Unknown Anarchist is not merely poetry of resistance. It is poetry about what we might build once we decide that the world as it is is not the only world possible.
🔴 DEJAN KOBAN: “KNOCKED ME DOWN AND DROVE ME INTO THE GROUND, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME CATAPULTING ME INTO THE SKY”
Among the particularly striking responses to the collection is that of Dejan Koban, a poet, performer, editor, and one of the key figures shaping the contemporary Slovenian poetry scene.
“Nikolai Jeffs’s poetry collection knocked me down and drove me into the ground, while at the same time catapulting me into the sky.”
Dejan Koban
More about Dejan Koban – interview in Dnevnik
Muanis Sinanović: Poetry as a Social Relationship
The extensive afterword to the collection was written by Muanis Sinanović, who situates Jeffs’s debut in a distinctive position within contemporary Slovenian poetry.
According to Sinanović, Jeffs is a poetic outsider precisely because his poetry does not fully belong to any of the prevailing currents. It is political, yet without the need for gestures of shock; accessible, yet never banal; socially engaged, yet concerned above all with the relationship to the other.
Sinanović writes:
“Perhaps what makes his stance rebellious today is precisely its lack of cynicism.”
It is precisely this absence of cynicism that matters. Jeffs’s anarchism is not a pose, and his critique of the world does not end in rejection. For him, poetry can become a space of community, comradeship, and the imagining of a more just world.
Sinanović therefore understands the collection as an opportunity for political poetry to once again become a social relationship – something that reaches beyond the book and seeks out another human being.
Read Muanis Sinanović’s afterword, “Poetry as a Social Relationship”
Three Poems: The World as a Shared Hearth
Jantarna lastovka has also published three poems from the collection, including the title poem, Poem of an Unknown Anarchist, and While Babylon Explodes.
The opening lines of the title poem already reveal one of the central spaces of Jeffs’s poetics:
“This earth is all my home, this world my very own hearth.”
Here, home is not a national territory. The world is not divided into “ours” and “theirs.” The poetic speaker invites travellers into a house that belongs to no one and can therefore be shared by everyone.
This is a cosmopolitan and anarchist gesture, yet at the same time a profoundly simple human one: opening the door to another person.
Read three poems from the collection on Jantarna lastovka
Cankarjev dom: A Distinctive, Direct, and Socially Open Voice
Poems of an Unknown Anarchist was presented in May 2026 at the 11th Open-Air Book Fair outside Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana. Nikolai Jeffs was in conversation with Muanis Sinanović.
On the occasion of the presentation, Cankarjev dom described the collection as poetry that enters the Slovenian literary landscape with a distinctive, direct, and socially open voice, oriented towards relationships, community, and the world.
The presentation at the Open-Air Book Fair highlighted something essential: Jeffs’s poetry seeks to transcend the text itself and re-establish the poem as a space of encounter.
Programme of the 11th Open-Air Book Fair – Cankarjev dom
🔴 FEATURED ON THE CULTURAL NEWS PROGRAMME KULTURA, TV SLOVENIJA 1
In July 2026, the collection also received national television coverage. On 14 July 2026, the cultural news programme Kultura on TV Slovenija 1 featured Poems of an Unknown Anarchist among the day’s major cultural events.
Alongside exhibitions in Ljubljana, London, and the Srebrenica Genocide Museum, Jeffs’s new poetry collection was also given a special presentation.
TV Slovenija 1 – Kultura, 14 July 2026
From Postcolonial Thought to Poetry
Nikolai Jeffs was born in Sheffield in 1968. He completed his undergraduate studies and doctorate at the University of Essex and has been active in Slovenia for decades as a university lecturer, editor, essayist, and researcher in postcolonial studies, culture, and politics. Among other works, he edited the Zbornik postkolonialnih študij (Anthology of Postcolonial Studies).
Yet Poems of an Unknown Anarchist is not academic poetry.
Its language is open, accessible, at times humorous, and at others directly political. Jeffs is less interested in constructing a poetic myth about himself than in asking what a poem can do between people.
That is why the anarchist of the title ultimately renounces even his own monument. More important than his name is what he leaves behind: an open house, the possibility of community, the righting of wrongs, and a world that is not yet finished.
At a time when cynicism often seems the easiest form of intelligence, Jeffs’s collection dares to embrace something far riskier: the belief that it is still possible to imagine a different world.
