Music for the Dead and Resurrected
Winner of the International Griffin Prize
Winner of the UNT Rilke Prize
Named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2020 by The New York Times
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.
Factory of Tears
In her first American publication, poet Valzhyna Mort contends with the joys and sorrows that comprise the heartache of self discovery. Factory of Tears, co-translated from the Belarusian by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, juxtaposes youthful coming-of-age against the struggles of a nation’s emergent vitality. Self-identification, national independence, and the bounty of metaphor and language take us to an edge where everything is wild.
Collected Body
Collected Body‘s voyages begin in the rural landscapes of childhood and move through grim fairy tales toward idiosyncratic images of the sea, “this polonaise in gray-flat minor.” In her first collection of poems composed entirely in English, Valzhyna Mort writes as effortlessly about the Caribbean or the United States as she does about her native Belarus. Her sensibility is captivating and forceful, finding light in the dimmest rooms yet holding on to dark truths, as when “death hands you every new day like a golden coin. / As the bribe grows / it gets harder to turn down.” These poems forge from desire and history an awakening in which the poet repays her debts of love and will.