Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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 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. Mort, born in Belarus and now living in America, teaches us that the remembrance of private histories has a power to confront collective, violent American myths.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
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.