Motherfield

Name: Motherfield
Brand: Unknown
SKU: 9781646052257
Price: 39.99 NZD
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Poems & Belarusian Protest Diary

By Julia Cimafiejeva

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( 119 ratings, 25 reviews)

Summary

Motherfield is a powerful poetry collection by Julia Cimafiejeva that intertwines the personal with the political and ecological. Born in rural Belarus, near the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Cimafiejeva chronicles the turmoil in Belarus following the 2020 presidential election through a raw, lyrical diary of protest, fear, exile, and hope. Her poems wrestle with the indelible impact of homeland, language, and trauma while asserting a fierce self-determination against authoritarian and patriarchal oppression. This is the first English-language collection of her work, translated by acclaimed poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.
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Format: Paperback / softback

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Motherfield

$39⁹⁹

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

Motherfield is suited to readers interested in contemporary poetry, political and ecological themes, and the human experience of exile. It will particularly appeal to those drawn to international voices and translational poetics within the arts and culture landscape.

Description

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 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 Cimafiejeva's poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and shortlisted for the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the collection is praised for its moving witness and testimony. Reviewers highlight Cimafiejeva’s lyricism amid hardship, describing the poems as a heartfelt reckoning with violence, displacement, and memory. The translations are celebrated for capturing the raw emotion and nuanced language of the original, making the horrors of contemporary Belarus and the shadow of Chernobyl resonate deeply and beautifully.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781646052257

Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 05 January 2023

Country: United States

Imprint: Deep Vellum Publishing

Illustration: Illustrations

Contributors:

Translated by Hanif Abdurraqib
Translated by Valzhyna Mort

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 127.0mm

Height: 203.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 280

Collections

Arts & Culture Julia Cimafiejeva Non-Fiction Poetry

About the Author

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).