Music for the Dead and Resurrected

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.

Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body. She has received the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Amy Clampitt Residency, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she writes in English and Belarusian.