About this item
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.
About the Author
Valzhyna Mort is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) , Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and, most recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020) . Her work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Granta, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry and many more. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (Tupelo Press) . She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Amy Clampitt Foundation, and the Civitella Raineri Foundation. She is a recipient of the Bess Hokins Prize from Poetry and Germany's Burda Prize for Eastern European authors. Born in Minsk, Belarus, Mort teaches at Cornell University, and writes in English and Belarusian. She translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. Valzhyna Mort received the NEA grant in translation in 2020.
