Literary critic Cynthia Haven writes in The Book Haven, in her review of Kossman's book “Other Shepherds": “Twenty years ago, critic Harold Bloom wrote to the young poet Nina Kossman to tell her that her “intensely eloquent” translations of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva manage to “capture the doom-eager splendor of a superbly gifted poet.” W.S.

Merwin wrote that these are “direct, strong, audible translations,” adding, “I hear Tsvetaeva’s voice, more of it, and in a new pitch, which makes something clear in her poems that I had only guessed at".

Instead, my poems sprang from the interior world, and at that age, I resisted the outside world and created—possibly at the expense of a comfortable co-existence with my peers—a world of my own.’ The themes of alienation in Marina Tsvetaeva's poems spoke to Kossman's experience.”[31] Canadian culture and literary critic Donald  Brackett writes about Kossman in his review of her book published in Critics at Large: “Alienation and nostalgia are, of course, the bread and butter of most exiles, but in the case of Kossman, displaced in America during its own time of social and political upheaval (one hauntingly like our own era today), those emotional states, shared by the older poet, were intangibles that could potentially damage or even destroy a person if they gave in to them without resistance but which could, as Tsvetaeva herself so clearly demonstrated in a model manner, also transform themselves into the raw material for the art of poetry.

It rehabilitates the concept of the literary use of ideology and points out a fatal mistake we all make when we begin to rely on common cliches, averting our eyes from reality.”[35] Nina Kossman emigrated from the Soviet Union with her family in 1972 and came to the US in 1973.

Her father, Leonid Kossman, was a notable linguist, philologist, author of textbooks on German phraseology and English usage and grammar for Russian speakers, and journalist, who had emigrated from Russia twice (in 1918 and 1972).