Music for the Dead and Resurrected

Starred review from October 19, 2020
The elegiac third collection from Mort asks searing, meditative questions born from war, massacre, and famine. “What has kept us alive,” Mort asks before answering, “Our death songs.” These poems are indeed lyrical death songs, bearing witness to horror and wondering “How could it be that I’m from this Earth,/ yet trees are also from this Earth?” Mort’s work contrasts suffering and tragedy with the persistence of the natural world: “Of the empire’s fall/ I heard on the radio/ while waiting for a weather forecast.” Life continues, but Mort questions the complexity of idealism and corruption, and a world in which “Justice has turned out to be/ more terrifying/ than injustice.” She asks, “What to do about the etymology of us?/ Our etymology?” The stakes of humanity are central to Mort, who seeks to offer a voice to those denied one throughout history: “Have I told you about how much I live inside your stories and not reality?” These are poems of reclamation and resurrection; to live in them is to confront the hard work of witness.

November 1, 2020
Born in Belarus when it was part of the Soviet Union, young Mort migrated to America, where she has quickly risen as a bright star in contemporary poetry. The widely praised author and editor of several books of poetry, Mort delivers her second collection entirely in English, and her speakers occupy a unique space between nations and eras, each one subject to the interplay of grave recollection and creative vision: ""memory, / the illegal migrant in time, cleans up / after imagination."" In longer poems, Mort unpacks her immigrant experience, while in others she obsesses over motion, movement, and inertia. In ""Nocturne for a Moving Train,"" the speaker shares momentary glimpses of surreal events unfolding inside the parks and apartments that fly by. In ""Music for Girl's Voice and Bison,"" Mort uses the Belarusian word for bison to open a short list of jarring yet hauntingly familiar images: ""a Trojan zoobrr packed with murdered poets, / a sylvan angel of history, / a bison of melancholia, / a black van."" Mort's poems are ethereal and personal, poignant and political.

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