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.

onglisted for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Shortlisted for the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry

“The language I wish to speak / isn’t contained in words,” writes Julia Cimafiejeva, while giving us these moving words of witness and testimony, compelling poems of kinship, of bravery and fear and reckoning: “we came back for a visit,” she writes, “only cemetery crosses / waved at us with rags / of their embroidered towels.” There is so much lyricism in this painful reckoning, the language itself uplifts even as it doubts itself in a time of great upheaval: “I approach the territory of a foreign language / as a melancholy spy / I must steal a secret / of these strange hills.” Poetry here doesn’t just survive despite translation between languages, but because of it. And for that, my special gratitude is to Cimafiejeva’s brilliant translators, Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib. The horrors of reality in today’s Belarus, the beatings and tortures of prisoners, the eerie presence of Chernobyl disaster in these pages, all true, all heart-breaking, and all also somehow carried through to us by beautiful, memorable, unrelenting words.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic

“Julia Cimafiejeva’s Motherfield is a minefield of memory. I close my eyes, recall the events that unfolded in my own country in 2020 and 2021. The similarities of our recent histories—the stun grenades, rubber bullets, beatings, and detentions—are striking. Still, there’s no mistaking Motherfield’s singularity, which is to say Cimafiejeva’s dexterity.” —Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast

“A dual-language publication, Motherfield reads like a testament to the innate multilingualism of Belarus. And after all, what Belarusians say matters just as much as what language they say it in. In Motherfield, Cimafiejeva has proved herself to be a bad student of fear. She wields her flexed, forceful verses like that mightiest of muscles — the tongue.” —Jennifer Wilson, The New York Times Book Review

“A devastatingly beautiful and essential read.” —Pierce Alquist, Book Riot

“Motherfield is a forceful diptych pairing the poet’s protest diary (spanning the period from Belarus’ 2020 presidential election to March 2021, after the poet has settled in Austria) with poems flowing from days full of fear and hope.” —Layla Benitez-James, Harriet Books (Poetry Foundation)

“Offering historical, political, and personal context to the poems that follow it, the diary is an activist’s account, but it is also a poet’s account; some of its moves and images linger and react with the poems’ more distilled elements…In the end the speaker keeps a ‘beaten hope’ that ‘builds its nest / On my roof and sings / In Belarusian.’ This poem, unlike others, is dated: August 5, 2020, just before the election, before the crackdown, before the president remained, again, in power. The beginning is at the end, enacting the cyclical nature of the “beaten hope” the poem names…[I]f Motherfield’s final poem relies on the protest diary for context, the poems that precede it—their images of wordlessness, thwarted regeneration, and ecological catastrophe—give the book its depth, and announce Julia Cimafiejeva as a poet that English language readers will want to follow in the future.” —Jessica Johnson, Rain Taxi

“This book is a sword; its poems cut through so much clutter to the white-hot wire of social, political, and personal injustice—warranted, searingly expressed, and yet somehow also nondogmatic, intuitively right, and artistically original. These poems speak volumes; to an astute reader, they can also serve as a warning. It is a voice that deserves and rewards our attention—hopefully you can give it yours.” —Andrew Singer, World Literature Today

3TimesRebel, 2023,
ISBN 9781739128784, 181 с., мяккая вокладка

Урывак з прэзентацыі, вершы па-беларуску Ганна чытае а 3:30 і 13:25.

Ribwort is a space to sit down with your pain and listen. You may think it’s not helpful, like a leaf of ribwort on a bleeding wound. The pain will probably be growing more and more acute, but if you face it, if you hold space for it. Eventually, it will shrink to the size of a scratch which a ribwort leaf can help heal. When we have healed, we become leaves of ribwort for others, so we can sit down with their pain and listen. Listen with compassion and without fear, without getting defensive or running away. This is what keeps us going.

In the summer of 2021, Hanna Komar brought the script for this book to a publisher in Belarus. He told her his business would be shut down for her protest poems. He couldn’t publish them. Since then, almost all independent publishers of Belarusian books in the Belarusian language have had their business suspended or liquidated. Books have been labelled “extremist” and people have been imprisoned for selling or owning them, while writers have been persecuted for writing them.
This is just a tiny tip of the iceberg of the repressions which unfolded in Belarus when the people stood up against the falsified election results on 9 August 2020 and the violence which followed afterwards. Every day, still, dozens of people are arrested in Belarus on political grounds. Some call that summer the awakening of Belarusians; others call it the birth of a new, free Belarus. No matter what it’s called, these years have felt for the nation, and the author of this poems, like unlearning what was already learnt helplessness. Yet these have also been maturing years through courage, solidarity, hope, pain, suffering, and disillusionment. A lot of wounds have opened.
This book doesn’t start with the protest poems of 2020. It consists of sections which tell about the poet’s relationship with her parents and with herself, about her romantic relationships, about her relationship with her homeland, and the poetry of civil resistance. Each of them is administering a leaf of ribwort to help the wounds heal.
Translated from Belarusian by the author, with the English version edited by the American poet Mary Kollar.
Hanna Komar is a poet, translator, writer. She has published four poetry collections, “Страх вышыні” [Fear of Heights], a collection of docu-poetry “Мы вернемся” [We’ll Return] and “Вызвалі або бяжы” [Set Me Free or Run] in Belarusian, as well as a bilingual collection Recycled. Her work has been translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Czech, Lithuanian, Slovenian and Russian. She translates her work into English. Hanna is a member of PEN and Freedom of Speech 2020 Prize laureate from the Norwegian Authors’ Union. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster. She is interested in using poetry to support Belarusian women to share experiences of gender based violence and patriarchy.

‘In the quiet of my body
a forgotten dream
tosses about
the apple I’ve eaten
acidifies,
blood gushes out with asters,
muscles wheeze, the voice
of the ligaments breaks,
and lamenting sweat
pierces my pores.
Only tears, quieter
than quiet itself,
can hear my deafness
to the polyphony of fate …’

  ‘ Hanna Komar’s poems display a refined ear for sound and sense both in Belarusian and translated by her into English. Her poems move seamlessly from the personal to the political, speaking with the urgency of a life experienced with compassion, dignity and resolve.’ 
Mary Kollar, poet and educator, USA