Motherfield: Poems & Belarusian Protest Diary

(Paperback)

---

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poets insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus.

Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poets diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poets struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile.

But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her impure Belarusian mother tongue Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejevas poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.

Reviews

"The language I wish to speak / isn't contained in words," writes Julia Cimafiejeva, while giving us these moving words of witness and testimony, compelling poems of kinship, of bravery and fear and reckoning: "we came back for a visit," she writes, "only cemetery crosses / waved at us with rags / of their embroidered towels." There is so much lyricism in this painful reckoning, the language itself uplifts even as it doubts itself in a time of great upheaval: "I approach the territory of a foreign language / as a melancholy spy / I must steal a secret / of these strange hills." Poetry here doesn't just survive despite translation between languages, but because of it. And for that, my special gratitude is to Cimafiejeva's brilliant translators, Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib. The horrors of reality in today's Belarus, the beatings and tortures of prisoners, the eerie presence of Chernobyl disaster in these pages, all true, all heart-breaking, and all also somehow carried through to us by beautiful, memorable, unrelenting words. Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic

Julia Cimafiejevas Motherfield is a minefield of memory. I close my eyes, recall the events that unfolded in my own country in 2020 and 2021. The similarities of our recent historiesthe stun grenades, rubber bullets, beatings, and detentionsare striking. Still, theres no mistaking Motherfields singularity, which is to say Cimafiejevas dexterity. Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast

Author Bio

Julia Cimafiejeva is a Belarusian poet and translator, and the author of four poetry collections in Belarusian. Her work has been translated into many languages and appeared in different projects, anthologies and magazines, including Poetry International, Literary Hub, Financial Times, Lyrikline, and others. Cimafiejeva translates from English and Norwegian. She is the winner of Carlos Sherman prize for the translations of poems by Stephen Crane. She currently lives in Graz, Austria with her husband, where she has been since 2020 at the invitation of the Kulturvermittlung Steiermark. 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. Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of multiple award-winning and New York Times-bestselling books, including poetry collections The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016) and A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019) and nonfiction collections They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), Go Ahead in the Rain: A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press, 2019), and A Little Devil in America (Random House, 2021).