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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 Cimafiejeväs poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.
About the author
Julia Cimafiejeva is a Belarusian poet and translator, and the author of four poetry collections in Belarusian. Her work has been translated into many languages and appeared in different projects, anthologies and magazines, including
Poetry International, Literary Hub, Financial Times, Lyrikline, and others. Cimafiejeva translates from English and Norwegian. She is the winner of Carlos Sherman prize for the translations of poems by Stephen Crane. She currently lives in Graz, Austria with her husband, where she has been since 2020 at the invitation of the Kulturvermittlung Steiermark.
Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections,
Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008),
Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and, mostly recently,
Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), named one of the best poetry book of 2020 by
The New York Times, and the winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of multiple award-winning and
New York Times-bestselling books, including poetry collections
The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016) and
A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019) and nonfiction collections
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017),
Go Ahead in the Rain: A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press, 2019), and
A Little Devil in America (Random House, 2021).
Summary
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.
Foreword
- Outreach and publicity via translators’ networks and social media
- Serialization outreach targeting The New Yorker, Granta, Poetry, The Nation, Paris Review, Astra Magazine, BOMB, Electric Literature, Literary Hub
- National review and feature outreach to print publications (NYTBR, New York Times, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe) and online (NPR, Literary Hub, Buzzfeed, The Millions)
- Targeted outreach to fans and champions of translated literature: World Literature Today, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Calvert Journal
- Virtual events featuring author and translators
- Promotion at/events pitched to Brooklyn Book Festival, Texas Book Festival, PEN World Voices
- Promotion on the publisher’s website (deepvellum.org), Twitter feed (@deepvellum), and Facebook page (/deepvellum); publisher’s e-newsletter to booksellers, reviewers, librarians
