Živor's process of poetic creation is, indeed, not closed and concluded before he starts writing a poem: the poet is constantly conspiring with the subject-matter (even when entire units are taken ready-made and formally rounded-up from the world of objects, as scenes from life and speech excerpts, from advertisments, book titles, CD covers, etc.). Their relationship is twofold and multifariously productive.

For Živor, it is not enough just to incorporate non-artistic, in this case non-poetic, material into his artistic poetic context. He gives a poetic form to his material and subjects it to a poetic principle, putting it into a metric framework, organizing it into rhythmic patterns, intervening in the field of its possible meanings and possible ways of reading it, attributing to it semantic streams and expanding its initially rather limited and one-way oriented textual impacts.

Vladimir Kopicl

("Dnevnik", Novi Sad, December 1980)

Andrej Živor's book titled "Behavior" may (and should) be read and understood as a sophisticated poetic complex. On the one hand, we are looking at a work which, as a poetically processed reality, with a unique creative intensity, with a minimum of artificial means, approaches a desired identification with its life background which radiates its opulent simplicity and endlessness of its forms. On the other hand, at the same time, this work becomes a unique target - poetic tract, in which full awareness of the inherent constants, determinants and limitations as a poetic act not as mere versification but as a complex process with several interlaced phases, is expressed in an exceptionally consequential way and with a creative discipline in the elaboration of the original concept. Therefore, the "Behavior" is to be seen as a threefold poetic entity that encompasses all the most important layers of an inextricably linked complex: writing - life, permanently present in the focus of Živor's creative interests.

Vladimir Kopicl

(From the review of the book "Ponašanje" (Behavior), "Stražilovo", 1981)

When talking about the latest book by Andrej Živor, it looks like the most natural thing to me to start referring to some attitudes I had put forward and explained with regard to his first book. In analyzing the Document, I highlighted several points marking the scope of this book: one, that it is a project based on a radical rejection of the values of poetic tradition, two, that it truly finds its place in one of the side-flows of the concrete or concretistic poetic streams and that it can, above all, be described as a document, a testimony to all the ways a poem can come to be. "Behavior", obviously, does not necessarily slip away from any of the presented assumptions, but by no means does it mean that a poem once learned is being repeated.

Selimir Radulović

("Letopis Matice srpske", June 1982)

As its title suggests, the book was not meant to be a single semantic unit, much less a book that is held together by one and the same artistic procedure. Rather, the only unifying element is the fact that there are ten short prose texts which might tentatively be called "stories" or "short stories". Each of them is an experiment in different artistic procedure, a different type of story-telling. This openness to the procedure, carried all the way to an experimental research, is the basic and the only common denominator of all the texts in this book.

The book looks like an experiment which shows the wide range of the author's sensibility: from a rheistic description to an eccentric short story, from an essay to a grotesque transformation and fantastic mirage.

Jovan Delić

(From the review of the book "10", Književna zajednica Novog Sada, Novi Sad, 1982)

Živor introduces himself as a story-teller with a calm hand and keen eye-sight, modern feeling for the detail and contemporary sensibillity. Even if he does not offer much novelty in the way of the form, the book called "10", with its independent content and authenticity of the experienced, with precise deviations from the dominant viewpoint in the younger Serbian prose, he does reach the hard-to-define limit beyond which story-telling ceases to be a skill and becomes a magic of charming, a magic of easily woven pictures of the necessary illusion of the inexpressible.

Predrag Marković

("Mladost", Beograd, 1983)

The unambiguity of the world in Živor's prose is constantly subject to review and the suspicion becomes a dominant element of the creative process. A dynamic development of light and shades, like two opposing streams of the objectivist and the phantasmagoric in Živor's prose, acquires the beauty of constituent fantasy.

If I attempted to express myself metaphorically about the procedure followed in the book "10", I would say that every new contact with Živor's prose reminded me of the movement of a pencil with an eraser on the other end. Eros and Tanatos, fear and rapture over beauty, madness as a dimension of freedom, fragrances… they all get erased and written, much as the forest fire swallows a landscape only to create a more horrifying one or make possible the birth of a future one.

Milan Todorov

("Glas omladine", Novi Sad, 1983)

With his first collection of short stories - "10", Andrej Živor shows he is a talented story-teller who stands out prominently among the contemporary prose writers in Yugoslavia. He is inclined to a pure experiment, a story-teller whose spiritual interests are directed to a research into the potentials of story-telling in a multimedia environment.

Žarko Rošulj

("Delo", Beograd, 1982)

Andrej Živor made a model of a book-project in his "Billboards", adjusting his poetic apparatus to an excerpt from the so called awareness industry , which to a considerable extent steers the course of social and economic development in the post-industrial societies. This is Živor's third poetic collection and its very title facilitates creation of hermeneutical circle that will see in it a description of a media profile of modern times.

The focal political point of this book may be described as an attempt of a poetic subject to make a double life for his poem, if I may say so. Therefore, on the one hand, there is an evident endeavor (I would call it an external feature of the poetic subject) to make the poem function as an one-way (literal) signal, while on the other hand (and I would call it an internal feature of the subject) one can begin to see in it traces of a (hidden) universal projection of the world, in which the essential poetic context is being realized. What I want to say is: under somewhat emphatic (except for the dense row of written "boards") and simple front, under seemingly superficial and routine communicational decoration and media howl, commendably organized symbolic groups of more permanent validity are radiated all around.

Selimir Radulović

("Letopis Matice srpske", Novi Sad, 1984)

The "Billboards" is a collection of "anti-poetic" pieces of writing in which, in line with Živor's earlier poetic writings ("Document", 1980 and "Behavior", 1981), the spiritually pauperized, manipulated, simply "alienated" consumer age of the contemporary civilization is reflected.

The poet therefore insists on a technicist vocabulary and quasi-sociological phraseology, consistently void of emotions even in those parts of the text where the poetic subject paraphrases the individual experience.

Predrag Marković

("Politika", Beograd, jun 1984)

The "Apaurin" by Andrej Živor can be read as a two-part epic in 39 segments, as a natural continuation of his previous projects. In a reduced, mostly minimalist form, in the cycle called "Touching", the poet examines the possibilities people touching one another, variations in possible actual establishing of contacts.

After a longer break Andrej Živor took in poetic activity, his new book once again proves that the poet is firm in pursuing his independent route, to some degree separated from the mainstream Serbian poetry, expanding his own, unique book of curiosity and expectations.

Vasa Pavković

(From the review of the book "Apaurin", Književna zajednica Pančeva, 1996)

In his latest book "Apaurin", Andrej Živor writes in a direct and clean-cut way. Živor cultivates simply reduced expression, finding his own self, and certainly some of us as well, on quite another and entirely different side of this creased and symmetrical world. His poems are like letters sent to one's own address.

There is no trace of whining self-pity here. There is bitterness, there is a typically urban spleen, there are statements that leave you breathless. This is how a personal confession suddenly turns into a significant breviary about our modest days, our survival and about our quiet joys.

Certainly, we are looking at one of the most remarkable books of poetry that have appeared this year. There are some really precious fragments in it, like the one about the shirt, clean and soft - unforgettable moments for every reader.

Draško Ređep

("Svet", Novi Sad, 1996)

The new Živor's book with a pharmaceutical affiliation to one of the best knows tranquilizers called "apaurin" was written on the basis of a carefully conceived network of joining together the technique and the contact. The stage where contacts are performed is an environment of live plane of nameless subjects who in a tense atmosphere carry out a procedure and activities in which there is an unusual mutual identification. Živor insists on the check-up of just that procedure which was cleaned of every vocal, emotional and nervous heat.

The book is divided into two cooperating parts, in which all the sections - from the first to the last, twenty-ninth - help one another, provide inspiration for one another and depend on each other. The idea of "The Touch" gave rise to the idea of "Apaurin", or calming down and becoming one with almost melancholy peace.

Zoran M. Mandić

("Dnevnik", Novi Sad, February 1997)

Andrej Živor appeared in 1983 with a new, in all probability the most successful of his books of poems, "Billboards". The most successful, not only because it may be the easiest to read and the most likeable of all poetry books our author has written, but because he managed to make the best of the possiblilities his medium, language, offered and to express what he had in mind. Quite simply put, the analyst writing for you this foreword shortcut to the selection of Živor's creative opus thinks that, out of the 44 titles comprizing this book, as many as 5 -10 have all the characteristics of what we can consider an anthological achievement, relevant to the poetry written in this area and the surroundings for the last two or three decades of the last century. If we mention only some of the possible criteria - individuality, reticence and semantic load of the expression, formal competence within the phrase which does not aim at virtuosity, poetic consequentiality along with provocation of self-imposed limits, and even a groundbreaking weight of the said, without any prophetic pose - this rhapsodic chain of poems is one of the lovely miracles of its time, now more readily noticed than when they first appeared.

Živor is one of those quite few authors who has never really joined, declaratively or essentially, any of the neo-/post-paradigms (and their numerous varieties), although at the same time paradoxically and actively swerved in and out of their many collateral strategies and networks, keeping his speech enviably independent from all strategies and phases of the day, decade and epoch, which he rather used as materials for his writing instead of some kind of poetic techna or a poetic obligation.
Besides, in the case of Živor as a poet, it seems as if everything has already been said, but not written. There will be more, we trust, much as we trust that this publication, i.e. the poems it brings in the right moment and scope, will decisively reveal Živor as one of the most articulate writers of this country from the end of the last and beginning of this century. As a writer, we can say, who inscribed our new planetary, dystopic experiences in a poetic way into his writings, with full human awareness, consciousness and responsibility - without dying in beauty, but working for it - in a time when many of us were not even able to diagnose such experiences, except on an everyday, tranquilized level.

Vladimir Kopicl

(From the foreword of Andrej Živor's book "Advertisements of Immortality - Selected and New Poems","Orpheus", Novi Sad, 2006, and from the book "Scenes from the Invisible", Narodna knjiga, Beograd, 2006)

The poetry of Andrej Živor, alias Andrej Tišma, on the poetic scene of Novi Sad in the last thirty years, on which I, too, have existed as a name or an author, is manifested, not so much in the past, as quite apart, special, with very strongly perceptible features which have not been present to such an extent in the poetry of any other poet in Novi Sad.

The poetry of Andrej Živor moves on the borderline between the so called material and spiritual. The spiritual being of man and his physical being are two different worlds. Andrej Živor moves as a spiritual being, as a poetic being, as someone who - not that he has not been incarnated in his human membrane, in his body, but who has not even been incarnated in what we call the world of reality, that we can see. Basically, this is a poetry of a displaced being, poetry of someone hiding beyond a place inaccessible to us. He is a being which can see and conclude, but whose place is not ours to know. He recognizes the visible world in the form of documents, advertisments, as in his first book "Document", in which he ascertains the so called found reality, copies instructions and tries to present a reality which is transparent and noticeable at first sight, but which certainly is not the essence of the visible world. In other words, this man has an ice-cold attitude towards that which is given him as his environment, as his life, the world in which he should establish his existence.

We have all along been in a situation to know that poetry is perishable just like the human body and that just as man is not immortal, so is not poetry. That is exactly why the title "Advertisments of Immortality" is so fitting, although basically ironic. You will find plenty of irony in the poetry of Andrej Živor. His speech is also a feigned speech. In some poems, he even divulges his intentions to us, what he will do in his poetry, how he prepares himself, what everything he has noticed is all about, what is important. He rejects, before all, something essential, something many a great poet fell prey to, actually a large majority of great Serbian poets, in other words - he does not work within any ideological speech. Most poets cannot help using their skill and knowledge of the language to ideological purposes. In Andrej Živor, we meet a poet totally cleansed of any ideological speech, and when we see occasional ideological speech, it appears only in examples of found poetry or if he himself recognizes with a document something he has found within reality.

This is a poetry of conceptual gestures, instructions for behaviour, imagined actions, notifications, quests for another being. Here, in his book "Apaurin", he departs from his assigned plan to ascertain reality and moves on to the being-to-being contacts. When a human being meets another human being, he finds out that the other one is inaccessible, as lonely as we are and that essentially, this barrier is hard to cross.

At the end of this invitation to read Andrej Živor, I think that this is poetry which everyone with self-respect should face, lest he should manage to harness his raptures, which he knows are dubious anyway. Let us see who we really are. This is especially important today, in this society which still sings about myths, which is enraptured by ideological matrixes, which still does not know that when you touch yourself you are touching the whole world. And that the other one whom you can touch is basically the same as you and that you should not get euphoric.

Vujica Rešin Tucić

(Spoken at the promotion of Andrej Živor's book "Advertisements of Immortality - Selected and New Poems" in the Small Centre of Culture, Novi Sad, 2007, and from the book "Collected Works - Volume II", Polja, Novi Sad, 2019)