Valzhyna Mort

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Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020),  named one of the best poetry book of 2020 by The New York Times, and the winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Her work has been honored with the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Granta, Gulf Coast, White Review, and many more. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose.  Mort teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. She translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems Air Raid (Ugly Duckling 2021).  Valzhyna Mort’s poetry collections have come out in translation in Germany, Sweden and Ukraine, while single poems have been translated into a dozen of languages. She has received the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors (Germany) and a Crystal of Vilenica prize (Slovenia). 

Origin of Tears

translated by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright

 

tears

this is when

your heart is sweating

in the mine of the thorax

never seeing the sun

 

do you feel the heart’s back aching?

do you feel the heart’s chest aching?

 

tears

this is when

the heart spits in your eyes

Published:

2008

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2022

Themes:

Death & Loss

Doubt & Fear

Mental Health

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic

Personification

the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing

Repetition

a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times

Rhetorical Question

a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered