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.