Collected Body

Valzhyna Mort

Collected Body‘s voyages begin in the rural landscapes of childhood and move through grim fairy tales toward idiosyncratic images of the sea, “this polonaise in gray-flat minor.” In her first collection of poems composed entirely in English, Valzhyna Mort writes as effortlessly about the Caribbean or the United States as she does about her native Belarus. Her sensibility is captivating and forceful, finding light in the dimmest rooms yet holding on to dark truths, as when “death hands you every new day like a golden coin. / As the bribe grows / it gets harder to turn down.” These poems forge from desire and history an awakening in which the poet repays her debts of love and will.

ISBN: 9781556593727

Format: Paperback

About the Author

Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body (both from Copper Canyon Press). She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, an Amy Clampitt fellowship, the Gulf Coast translation prize, and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. Valzhyna Mort’s new book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, is forthcoming from FSG.

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