Collected Body

by Valzhyna Mort

"Mort is a fireball. . . . Personal, political, and passionate, Mort's poetry will surely sustain many reading audiences. Highly recommended."—Library Journal

"A one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight."—Midwest Book Review

"Mort's style—tough and terse almost to the point of aphorism—recalls the great Polish poets Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska."—Los Angeles Times

Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic Belarusian poet, and Collected Body is her first collection composed in English. Whether writing about sex, relatives, violence, or fish markets as opera, Mort insists on vibrant, dark truths. "Death hands you every new day like a golden coin," she writes, then warns that as the bribe grows "it gets harder to turn down."

"Preface"

on a bare tree—
a red beast,
so still, it has become the tree.
now it's the tree that prowls over the beast,
a cautious beast itself.

a stone thrown at its breast

is so fast—the stone has become the beast.
now it's the beast that throws itself like a stone,
blood like a dog-rose tree on a windy day,
and the moon is trying on your face
for the annual masquerade of the dead.

death decides to wait to hear more.
so death mews:
first—your story, then—me.

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus. Her American debut, Factory of Tears, appeared in 2008 and she was featured on the cover of Poets & Writers. She has received many honors and awards, including a Civitella Raineri fellowship. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 13, 2011

Reviews

[Bogi Takács]

I mostly really appreciated this, and then at the end it betrayed me.

A lot of very sensitive poetry about Eastern European family history without leaning into tropes; intriguing sentence structure and imagery; body exploration.

And then it had a lengthy, 11-page prose poem about a classmate (who clearly has one of my own disabilities - motor dyspraxia) which had exactly the same mocking attitudes I was subjected to from my own classmates in Eastern Europe. Among other things, it featured the classmate described as a shambling, rotting corpse. No thanks.

_________
Source of the book: Spouseperson got it (but I read it first)

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

had not heard of this author before picking this collection up. clearly i was missing out. absolutely brilliant collection i could see myself reading over and over again. particularly liked the prose “Aunt Anna”.

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really torn about this one. There are several poems, and even more individual lines scattered throughout “Collected Body”, in which Mort captures a lot of my own memories and feelings of what it is like to come from a former Soviet republic, the personal and cultural associations that surround the experience. There is a cruelty towards the female body (at least, that is how I think about it, again from a cultural perspective) that Mort captures in her poems that I also struggle with. “Love” was one such poem, beautiful and painful in equal measure that I think will land differently based on the reader’s perspective and degree of cultural removal. There is a lot of weight to the images and scenarios Mort conjures. On the other hand, the two long poems, “Aunt Anna” and “Zhenya” did not work for me. There were many lines in “Aunt Anna”, even sections of it, that felt like they could have been shorter poems, or which felt more impactful than the pages-long narrative Mort was conjuring. “Zhenya” felt like it was two halves half-heartedly stitched together and barely holding on to each other. The perpetuation of cruelty and ableism towards the titular classmate only made it worse. It made me wonder whether Mort understood that she was perpetuating these pervasive ideas that still very much have a foothold in this part of the world, or if she thought she was subtly critiquing them by putting the speaker in a position of imagined vulnerability in the second part of the poem. “Collected Body” is therefore more uneven than Mort’s most recent collection, “Music for the Dead and Resurrected”. It captures many of the same themes but in a rawer, even angrier, form. It felt like a hostile collection, not because Mort framed it as such, but because of the liveliness of the cultural memory held within its pages.

[Malika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mort has done it again with this second collection. Her poems move effortlessly across the Geographical landscapes of Eastern European, the Caribbean and North America. Her imagery and attention to detail captivate because each image or line has an unusual twist as if the destination of the line, the poem and indeed the image surprises Mort in the moment of composition. I am always pleasantly surprised by the strange destinations, unusual twists and leaps that mort's imagery employ. These poems sing vulgar songs and profane hymns basking in family history, geographical specificity and a loose hint of mythology. I am impressed with Collected body where the body can be born again through the window of a train (Aunt Anna) or all the woman a man "has ever had,/ they hold out their bodies like towels,/and whisper: take us, sister, dry him with us.

[Kaitlyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought that Mort did an exceptional job with imagery--it was all so raw and visceral. There were many individual lines that I thought were beautiful and lovely. However, when all put together into a single poem, all put together in this collection, I found myself having a hard time following the messages, meanings, and story.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What is love if not a need for a beholder, a witness; if not the possibility to be immortalized in the story of another person? The insect caught in a drop of amber knew what it was doing. Neither helper nor bystander. Your blood runs like a tape of an implanted recorder. You are my plan for immortality. The audience for my privacy. I'm molding you into a gravestone of all the words and images of myself I won't be able to sustain forever." (from "Zhenya," one of two long prose poems in this collection)

Okay, so maybe there's a bit of morbidity there along with the romanticism, but when has romanticism not intertwined love and death?

"often to shed light on the darkness,
light isn't enough. Often what I need is an even darker
darkness." (from "Mocking Bird Hotel")

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical, dense, and surprising. It is work to read her poems, but work that is richly rewarded. The poem “Love” is worth the price of the book.

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Electric.

[Crystal]

I wish there wasn't a lengthy poem in this collection making fun of a peer's disability.

[EIJANDOLUM]

Often what I need is an even darker darkness.

Always.

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Mort’s poetry you get the sense that imagery and surrealism is being used to avoid looking at the horrific self and other in order to still be able to love that self and that other.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

really, a 3.5. mort's language is off-kilter, not quite surreal, but not quite real either. she packs a lot into her metaphors and the images are dense dense. dense. i really enjoyed this, but somehow it didn't push me over the top. i may revisit in a while, i think i could be struck differently on a reread.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really loved a few poems in this book, and I enjoyed the surprising descriptions and turns of language. Other poems were just too opaque for me to grasp, and the long prose poems didn't keep my interest.