Poet’s Biography

Valzhyna Mort

VALZHYNA MORT was born in Minsk, Belarus, and writes in Belarusian and English. Her newest book is Music for the Dead and Resurrected, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body (both from Copper Canyon Press) and a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Amy Clampitt Residency, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and most recently, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for translation. She teaches at Cornell University.

I picked your book from Sandeep’s shelf,

the poet’s biography read: “lives and teaches.”

Though the book was fairly recent, it was no longer true. 

I almost met you once – an almost-meeting I remember clearly

because of my embarrassment:

I was having loud sex in a hotel room

while you stood knocking at the door wanting to give me your book. 

Now the trains stand frozen in a winter storm, 

and I pity the trains 

as if they were shivering butterflies, 

a whole herd of them, the last of its kind, 

stuck in the snow England has never seen.  

Sandeep is cooking dinner, you are dead, the lover’s gone, 

your book in my frostbitten hands.