"They Have Me". In the Garden of Great-Grandmothers -- Circus -- Umbilical -- Body of a Poetess -- Mother Tongue -- Rocking the Devil -- 1986 -- Motherfield (1) -- Motherfield (2) -- [A Swinging Girl] -- Zhlobin, My First City -- MSCRRDG -- Language Is a Prison Sentence -- Negative Linguistic Capability -- Papercutting -- [My Poems Sniff] -- Emperor's New Clothes -- Family Threshold -- Order -- I Read a Poem in a Foreign Language -- Winter -- Self-Portrait as an Avocado Seed -- "They Have Me".
Summary:
"A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet's 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 poet's diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet's 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 escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her Belarusian mother tongue? Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield? This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva's poetry in English, prepared by a team of cotranslator-poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib."-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.