Factory of Tears (Lannan Literary Selections) (Byelorussian Edition)
The 26-year-old Belarusian Mort has made a big splash in Europe. With help from the popular, Pulitzer-winning Franz Wright, this thin, uneven, but decidedly exciting bilingual first U.S. edition shows how Mort's energies work. Some poems last just a few lines; others stretch out across pages of fast-moving prose, and the best bring into disturbing collision the difficult circumstances of Eastern Europe (crowds, relative poverty, bad weather) and the recent results of globalization (suicide bombers, teen culture, game shows with telephonic life lines). Mort says of her compatriots in Belarusian I, we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread and calls our future/ a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon. Later poems reflect her move to the U.S. (she now resides in Virginia), and contemplate those who have made the same move before: of Polish Immigrants, she asks, how do they break away from the land/ where even stones take root. At her best, Mort shows a ragged power Americans might not otherwise know: she writes in a crackling prose poem, I protest against everything: low-quality goods in supermarkets, pigs in the subway, and those who protest against pigs in the subway... this is the only way to survive.(Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.