Praise for Music for the Dead and Resurrected
“Her memory is incurable, her imagination is anguished, because the small country she comes from is beauty and sorrow. Boldly, Valzhyna Mort stands out in the Belarusian poetic tradition. Reading her work, one feels that she has come to us from the whole earth.”
―Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate in Literature
“At the core of Valzhyna Mort’s lyric fusion of personal and collective history is the uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction at Chernobyl, spreading the radiation of an unknown tongue across her natal city of Minsk, Belarus, a city that hides its column-ribs/under a nurse-clean robe of snow pandemics. In the liminal space between language and silence, at dizzying imaginative speed, Mort transmutes her third language, English, into something resembling a fourth: the language of all that has been kept from consciousness concerning the century past. Her lyric art in contemporary English is astonishing, and glimmering beneath it is something not often encountered: the sensibility of another world, arriving to inform our perilous present. Music for the Dead and Resurrected is fiercely original, and a tour de force.”
―Carolyn Forché, author of In the Lateness of the World
“The voice of Valzhyna Mort is a miraculous reminder that words can do many things—they can dance, can bask in irony, can praise love but they can also tell the truth. These poems are not only moving, they do the most elementary work of human language. They elevate the miserable, the barbarian, the numb to the level of universal idiom of wisdom and grace.”
―Adam Zagajewski, author of Asymmetry
“Mort is well-known in Europe as a crusader on behalf of Belarusian language and identity. In English, cast in rapid-fire free verse lyrics and sequences, 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 . . .”
―Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
“[Music for the Dead and Resurrected] asks searing, meditative questions born from war, massacre, and famine . . . The stakes of humanity are central to Mort, who seeks to offer a voice to those denied one throughout history . . . These are poems of reclamation and resurrection; to live in them is to confront the hard work of witness.”
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Mort's poems are ethereal and personal, poignant and political."
— Diego Báez, Booklist
"Hauntingly beautiful . . . Mort is not simply writing another history of the worst crimes of the past century, she is creating a mythology for how we internalize those crimes at the individual level, and, perhaps, more importantly, the ways in which we both silence, remember, and re-create them as a result. . . we live in Mort’s lyric poems, and it is here that her mythologizing genius is most profound . . . The historical intertwined with the personal, the brutish and inhumane wrapped up in the all-too human, this is the mythology of Valzhyna Mort. A poetry that demonstrates the complexity of human experience."
— New York Journal of Books
“[A] striking study of what Belarus can teach the world about state violence, collective memory, and the role of poetry in fighting tyranny . . . [Mort] captures, through language, the contours of dissent. Soviet monuments remain upright in Minsk, like concrete odes to terror, repression, and silence. And yet Music for the Dead and the Resurrected feels like its own monument, not only to Belarusians but also to victims of state violence around the world.” ―Jennifer Wilson, The New Yorker
"Valzhyna Mort is a spellbinding poet . . . In her new book, The Music for the Dead and Resurrected, she creates a world of images and metaphors that reverberate in our minds long after we are finished reading. How so? Perhaps because these poems about Belarus understand something about us, about our own lives in this moment in time, and they respond to the human grief that manifests itself no matter where it is located." ―Ilya Kaminsky, McSweeney’s
"A rich collection with language so sharp it unnerves." ―Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
"Mort refutes the expected wistfulness of elegy in the way her poems speak so urgently, while also exhibiting a peacefulness threatened and a naturalness made dark in lines like, '―wet laundry claps in the wind like gunfire' and 'Like a manly tear, a bird glides across the air.' Her lines are gasping and anguished, but tempered with an inquisitive, tender pragmatism that steadies the tone of Music." ―Julia Harrison, The Sewanee Review
“Mort powerfully juxtaposes lyrical with narrative verse, bringing the past and the present, the individual and the collective, together." ―Paula Erizanu, The Calvert Journal
“In Valzhyna Mort’s gorgeous Music for the Dead and Resurrected, images are often quirky and appealingly askew--a “purse opened like a screaming mouth” and “A bone is a key to my motherland [Minsk].” Mort writes: “Among my people, only the dead/have human faces.” What happens to the living then? The living, with their empty faces, must reckon with history and memory, “the joy/of a deactivated face,/vacated face.” The living ask in a refrain, “where am I from?” Mort answers back: language.” ―Victoria Chang, Oprah Daily
Praise for Valzhyna Mort
“Mort is a fireball . . . Personal, political, and passionate, Mort’s poetry will surely sustain many reading audiences.”
―Library Journal
“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