Staff Pick
In this award-winning collection, Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort invokes a harrowing reckoning with historical mass atrocities, bent through the keyhole of family memory. Her poems are precise and angular, tinged with ironies and bizarre details that leave a lasting imprint on the reader — a kind of spooky carousel of whispering chestnuts, rattling bone-keys, faces in household objects (purses, shovels), and ghostly bison. I hesitate to reduce the complexity of Mort’s risk-taking book with a cliché about its “continued relevancy”; and yet extremely relevant, even prescient, it remains, speaking crucially to the ways that buried histories, like buried traumas, tend to haunt through repetition. Recommended By Alexa W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN PRIZE
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2020 BY The New York Times
In her book of letters to the dead, the prize-winning poet Valzhyna Mort relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history.
With shocking, unforgettable lyric force, Valzhyna Mort's Music for the Dead and Resurrected confronts
the legacy of violent death in one family in Belarus. In these letters to the dead, the poet asks: How do we mourn after a century of propaganda? Can private stories challenge the collective power of Soviet and American historical mythology?
Mort traces a route of devastation from the Chernobyl fallout and a school system controlled by ideology to the Soviet labor camps and the massacres of World War II. While musical form serves as a safe house for the poet's voice, old trees speak to her as the only remaining witnesses, hosts to both radiation and memory.
Valzhyna Mort, born in Belarus and now living in the United States, conjures a searing, hallucinogenic ritual of rhythmic remembrance in a world where appeals to virtue and justice have irrevocably failed.
Review
"Mort's poems are ethereal and personal, poignant and political." — Diego Báez , Booklist
Review
"[Mort's] poems seem to channel her country's complicated and highly pressurized history into a voice that is simultaneously strange, intimate, lonesome, hilarious, surreal and all too real." — Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
Review
"[Music for the Dead and Resurrected] asks searing, meditative questions born from war, massacre, and famine...These are poems of reclamation and resurrection." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Synopsis
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN PRIZE
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2020 BY The New York Times
In her book of letters to the dead, the prize-winning poet Valzhyna Mort relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history.
With shocking, unforgettable lyric force, Valzhyna Mort's Music for the Dead and Resurrected confronts the legacy of violent death in one family in Belarus. In these letters to the dead, the poet asks: How do we mourn after a century of propaganda? Can private stories challenge the collective power of Soviet and American historical mythology?
Mort traces a route of devastation from the Chernobyl fallout and a school system controlled by ideology to the Soviet labor camps and the massacres of World War II. While musical form serves as a safe house for the poet's voice, old trees speak to her as the only remaining witnesses, hosts to both radiation and memory.
Valzhyna Mort, born in Belarus and now living in the United States, conjures a searing, hallucinogenic ritual of rhythmic remembrance in a world where appeals to virtue and justice have irrevocably failed.
About the Author
Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body. She has received the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Amy Clampitt Residency, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she writes in English and Belarusian.