Belarusian professor releases new poetry collection

War and displacement, music and gardens, language and earth: These are the themes of Valzhyna Mort's new book of poetry, "Rose Pandemic," just released in Belarus, her native country. It includes new poems as well as selected works from her two American books, "Factory of Tears" (2008) and "Collected Body" (2012). "The landscape of Belarus is burdened by silence, by the unverbalized history of war and colonization. I think of writing into that silence," says Mort, Professor of the Practice in the Department of English. She describes "Rose Pandemic" as "trying to untie the nerves of silence." Mort notes that it is impossible to sum up a complicated history of a country "whose borders and occupiers shifted with the inevitable persistence of new seasons." Cultural devastation in Belarus began in the 1930s with Stalin's repressions. Eighty percent of people involved in literary writing and publishing were shot or sent off to Siberia before World War II. "Until this day, there is not a single museum, not a state monument commemorating this era," says Mort.