Music For The Dead And Resurrected: Poems

"Valzhyna Mort is well-known in Europe as a crusader on behalf of Belarusian language and identity. Her poems seem to channel her country’s complicated and highly pressurized history into a voice that is simultaneously strange, intimate, lonesome, hilarious, surreal and all too real: “Here, history comes to an end/ like a movie/ with rolling credits of headstones.” Her images are so funny – she recalls, for instance, how “a street opened my mouth like a doctors spatula” – yet precisely tuned, boring into us when our consciences are at their heaviest and we need some serious levity to help us carry them."