Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort and translated by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright

This is poetry from Belarus.

Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort translated by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright is published by Copper Canyon Press. This is a Book originally written in Belarusian. This was published in 2008.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781556592744E12.

Factory of Tears, by Valzhyna Mort and translated by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright from Belarusian, brings Belarusian-language poetry from Belarus into English through Belarusian grief, manufacture, and tears imagined not as sentiment but as a system that produces evidence. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for tears, factory, testimony, and the machinery by which private sorrow becomes public record, not as a fixed lesson about Belarus. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Factory of Tears belongs in the translated poetry library because it deepens Mort’s work as a Belarusian poetics of pain, memory, and resistance.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.