Books by Valzhyna Mort
Something Indecent: Poems Recommended by Eastern European Poets (Poets in the World)
Something Indecent is intended as a kind of symposium on European poetry. Seven contemporary Eastern European poets—Adam Zagajewski, Vera Pavlova, Tomaž Šalamun, Aleš Šteger, Nikola Madzirov, Eugenijus Ališanka, 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, Nâzim Hikmet, Antonio Machado, Czesław Miłosz, Cesare Pavese, Raymond Queneau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tomaž Šalamun, Sappho, Anna Swir, Wisława Szymborska, Georg Trakl, Tomas Tranströmer, César Vallejo, Paul Valéry, and many others.
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Gossip & Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems & Prose
by Ilya Kaminsky, Valzhyna Mort, Katie Farris
There has been no anthology in English dedicated to the poetics of the great generation of Russian modernists. For a group of poets so widely admired, relatively little seems known about their philosophy of poetry and their poetic influences, and although there is tremendous aesthetic diversity in this group, they have more in common than many readers assume. Russian poetry was a small world, made even smaller by the arrests, disappearances, pogroms, famines, assassinations, and political conflagration of the revolutionary era, and literary differences were often overcome by a mutual sense of historic cataclysm. This anthology’s structure is like textile, with many common threads intertwining, doubling back, sometimes unraveling―creating a matrix of poetic conversation: Mayakovsky on Khlebnikov, Pasternak on Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva on Pasternak, Brodsky on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova on Mandelstam. Shared themes range from expected (the word) to serendipitous (the ocean). Above all these poets are obsessed with proximity―to God, to nature and place, to poetic predecessors, to language (their own and others), and always, forever, to the inexpressible.
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Collected Body
"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 styletough and terse almost to the point of aphorismrecalls 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 fastthe 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:
firstyour story, thenme.
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.
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Factory of Tears: A Lannan Literary Selection (Byelorussian and English Edition)
"Mort...strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language." —The New Yorker
“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
"(Mort) is most characterized by an obstinate resistance and rebellion against the devaluation of life, which forces her to multiply intelligent questions, impressive thoughts, and alluring metaphors, while her rhythm surprisingly arises as a powerful tool for the most dramatic moments of her verses....One of the best young poets in the world today."—World Literature Today
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.
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