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.
