Valzhyna Mort

In her book of letters to the dead, the prize-winning poet Valzhyna Mort relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history. In Music for the Dead and Resurrected, Valzhyna Mort asks how we mourn after a century of silence and propaganda. How do we remember our history and sing after being silenced? Mort draws on intimate and paradoxical first-hand accounts of a past grandparent generation of the Soviet labor camps, redistribution of land, and massacres of World War II in Belarus. As her country is being run by a long-time dictator, the poet creates a ceremony of myth making for the erased history and family. Music for the Dead and Resurrected is a space where the living and the dead can coexist sharing stories, where the Belarusian woods can act as witnesses of forgotten lives, and where musical form can create a new lyric mythology and an uncompromised language of remembrance. Mort, born in Belarus and now living in America, teaches us that the remembrance of private histories has a power to confront collective, violent American myths.

Poems

Music for the Dead and Resurrected

Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic Belarusian poet, and this is her first collection composed in English. Whether writing about sex, relatives, violence, or fish markets as opera, Mort insists on vibrant, dark truths.

Collected body

Hanif Abdurraqib

Julia Cimafiejeva

Poems & Belarusian Protest Diary

Motherfield

A young Belarussian poet co-translated by Pulitzer Prize-winner Franz Wright, who calls Valzhyna Mort "Electrifying!"

Factory of Tears

Ilya Kaminsky

Katie Farris

A selection of poems and seminal prose texts about poetics from major Russian writers of the Modernist era.

Russian Modernist Poems and Prose

Gossip and Metaphysics

This charismatic Belarusian poet is considered "one of the best young poets in the world today " ("World Literature Today").

Collected Body

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2020 Music for the Dead and Resurrected captures the complexity of living in the shadows of imperial force, of the vulnerability of bodies, of seeing with more than the eyes. Valzhyna Mort's work is characterised by a memorial sensibility that honours those lost to the violences of nation states. In Music for the Dead and Resurrected the poet offers us a body of work which balances political import with serious play. There are few poets writing with such an intuitive sense of the balance between arcane and contemporary currents in poetry. Mort's lines are timeless, finely honed to last beyond a single lifetime.

A young Belarussian poet co-translated by Pulitzer Prize-winner Franz Wright, who calls Valzhyna Mort Electrifying!

Valzhyna Mort

Books

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