Valzhyna Mort

In 2005 she lived in Warsaw, Poland, on a Gaude Polonia scholarship which led in 2007 to a publication of a Polish poet, Rafal Wojaczek, in Belarusian translation entitled Dead Season. Since 2006 Mort has lived in the USA, where she is a writer-in-residence at the University of Baltimore. She has also been a writer in residence at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin and Sylt-Quelle in Germany and at the International Authors’ House in Graz, Austria.

Her second book of poetry, Factory of Tears, translated by Mort in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, came out in 2008. It was the first bilingual Belarusian-English poetry book ever published in the USA, and was later also translated and published in Sweden and Germany. Set in a land haunted by the spectre of a post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and marked by the violence of the recent past, intense moments of joy lighten the darkness. “Grandmother” − as a person and an idea − is a recurring presence in poems, and startlingly fresh images − desire described as the approaching bus that immediately pulls away or pain as the embrace of a very strong god “with an unshaven cheek that scratches when he kisses you” − occupy and haunt the mind. The musical litanies of the poems’ phrases mesmerise the reader, but sudden moments of discord remind us that Mort’s world is not entirely harmonious. “I’m a recipient of workers’ comp from the heroic Factory of Tears”, she writes in the final stanza. “I have calluses on my eyes . . . And I’m happy with what I have.”

Engaged, voracious and memorable, Factory of Tears is the remarkable American debut of a rising international poetry star. [Valzhyna Mort appeared at the Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam in June 2009. Her poet page was created for this occasion.]

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