Collected Body

Valzhyna Mort

Collected Body‘s voyages begin in the rural landscapes of childhood and move through grim fairy tales toward idiosyncratic images of the sea, “this polonaise in gray-flat minor.” In her first collection of poems composed entirely in English, Valzhyna Mort writes as effortlessly about the Caribbean or the United States as she does about her native Belarus. Her sensibility is captivating and forceful, finding light in the dimmest rooms yet holding on to dark truths, as when “death hands you every new day like a golden coin. / As the bribe grows / it gets harder to turn down.” These poems forge from desire and history an awakening in which the poet repays her debts of love and will.

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ISBN: 9781556593727

Format: Paperback

Love

The most human sound a body can hear—

teeth being cleaned late at night across the hallway.

Even the locusts listen confused.

She too, on a bare mattress thrown over the floor,

is surprised how much of his body is in that sound—

as if she had just now noticed that he had arms.

 

The spit shooting down the sink—

she still counts as his body.

The noose of his saliva over her pussy—

she still counts as his body.

 

A suitcase of the body slapped

with stickers of scars from every location.

He folds her inside

and he ships her, and ships her, and ships

across canteens behind gas stations, across seas,

across the hands of men in blue uniform,

he ships her faster to catch the early delivery truck.

 

When he sits underneath her skirt

she is compelled to make confession.

 

Through the wall their neighbor reads the names of medications,

and she thinks the neighbor is counting precious stones:

amiodarone, zofenopril, metoprolol, mexifin.

Oh yes, she will inherit those jewels.

She will wear those jewels over her mouth to hide its twist.

 

But for now

he cleans his teeth and the locusts fall silent.

She lies across the hallway smelling

his long-day clothes tossed on the bathroom floor,

as his sweat crawls out of the cotton folds,

and disperses, and mulitiplies

like cockroaches.

About the Author

Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body (both from Copper Canyon Press). She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, an Amy Clampitt fellowship, the Gulf Coast translation prize, and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. Valzhyna Mort’s new book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, is forthcoming from FSG.

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