A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet's insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus. Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poet's diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet's struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and frien... continue
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 ... continue