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.

'Zekameron' comes from 'Zek' meaning prisoner and is a word-play on Boccaccio's Decameron. 'He came back from interrogation looking like death. Some people look better than he did when they're being put in their coffin. "What happened then? Did they stick any other articles of the Criminal Code on you? Or break your jaw?" "Nothing like that. I've got toothache..." The 100 tales in Zekameron are based on the 14th Century Decameron, but Znak is closer to Beckett than to Boccaccio. Banality and brutality vie with the human ability to overcome oppression. Znak's stories in different voices chart 100 days in prison in Belarus today. The tone is laconic, ironic; the humour sparse. The stories bear witness to resistance and self-assertion and the genuine warmth and appreciation of fellow prisoners.

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 friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile. But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her impure Belarusian mother tongue? Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield? This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva's poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.

"Mort is a fireball. . . . Personal, political, and passionate, Mort's poetry will surely sustain many reading audiences. Highly recommended."--"Library Journal"

"A one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight."--"Midwest Book Review"

"Mort's style--tough and terse almost to the point of aphorism--recalls the great Polish poets Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska."--"Los Angeles Times"

Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic Belarusian poet, and "Collected Body" is her first collection composed in English. Whether writing about sex, relatives, violence, or fish markets as opera, Mort insists on vibrant, dark truths. "Death hands you every new day like a golden coin," she writes, then warns that as the bribe grows "it gets harder to turn down."

"Preface"

"on a bare tree--
a red beast,
so still, it has become the tree.
now it's the tree that prowls over the beast,
a cautious beast itself."

"a stone thrown at its breast
is so fast--the stone has become the beast.
now it's the beast that throws itself like a stone,
blood like a dog-rose tree on a windy day,
and the moon is trying on your face
for the annual masquerade of the dead."

"death decides to wait to hear more.
so death mews:
first--your story, then--me."

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus. Her American debut, "Factory of Tears," appeared in 2008 and she was featured on the cover of "Poets & Writers." She has received many honors and awards, including a Civitella Raineri fellowship. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

"Something Indecent" is intended as a kind of symposium on European poetry. Seven contemporary Eastern European poets--Adam Zagajewski, Vera Pavlova, Tomaž salamun, Ales steger, Nikola Madzirov, Eugenijus Alisanka, and editor Valzhyna Mort--introduce us to poems by writers who have become for them windows onto the world. They were asked: Who are the best representative poets of your region? Your generation? And, more broadly: Who are your favorite European poets of the 20th century? What European poets, across the millennia, are most important to an understanding of your particular region? Spanning thousands of years and thousands of miles, their surprising, often unpredictable choices--and the reasons for those choices--are collected here, forming the latest entry in a poetic conversation carried across centuries, countries, and traditions. More than a presentation of contemporary Eastern European poets, "Something Indecent" is a conversation about how European poets view themselves, their contemporaries, their century, and the place of their region in the millennia.
Includes poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Brodsky, Catullus, Paul Celan, John Donne, Zbigniew Herbert, Nazim Hikmet, Antonio Machado, Czeslaw Milosz, Cesare Pavese, Raymond Queneau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tomaž salamun, Sappho, Anna Swir, Wislawa Szymborska, Georg Trakl, Tomas Transtromer, Cesar Vallejo, Paul Valery, and many others.

"Valzyhna Mort . . . can justly be described as a risen star of the international poetry world. Her poems have something of the incantatory quality of poets such as Dylan Thomas or Allen Ginsberg. . . . She is a true original."-Cuirt International Festival of Literature

"[T]he searing work of Valzhyna Mort . . . dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her [and] to be battered by the moods of the Belarus language which she is passionately battling to save from obscurity."-"The Irish Times"

Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic young poet who writes in Belarussian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language in the aftermath of attempts to absorb it into Russian. Known throughout Europe for her live readings, Mort's poetry and performances are infused by the politics of language and the poetry of revolution, where poems are prayers and weapons.

"when someone spends a lot of time running
and bashing his head
against a cement wall
the cement grows warm
and he curls up with it
against his cheek
like a starfish . . ."

Valzhyna Mort is a Belarussian poet known throughout Europe for her remarkable reading performances. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, and she is the recipient of the Gaude Polonia stipendium and was a poet-in-residence at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany. She currently lives in Virginia.

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright earned an MFA in translation from the University of Arkansas. Franz Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his book "Walking to Martha's Vineyard."