Ivana Milankova belongs to the first generation of poets from Central and Eastern Europe to be influenced by American anti-establishment poetry, including the Beat poets. Serbia's rich historical and religious history is evident in these poems and there is an untiring effort to reach beyond the sensations of the world around her towards mystical revelation, to communicate the incommunicable.
Some poems emerge from private experience and others from the imagined experiences. Milankova's poetry does not seek to be contemporary in that it does not deal directly with recent conflict in the Balkans. Rather it draws on the insights and shortcomings evident in the wider European culture
