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          allegro for shooing off the police
          adagio for washing the body
          scherzo for soft laughter and tears
          rondo for covering the body with good earth  

Antigone, dead siblings
are set.
As for the living —
pick me for a sister.

I, too, love a proper funeral.
Drag, Dig and Sisters’ Pop-Up Burial.

Landlady,
I make the rounds of graves
keeping up
my family’s
top-notch properties.

On a torture instrument
called an accordion
I stretch my bones
into fingers of a witch.

My guts have been emptied
like bellows
for the best sound.

Once we settle your brother,
I’ll show your forests
of the unburied dead.

We’ll clean the way only two sisters
can clean a house:

no bones scattered like dirty socks,
no ashes at the bottom of kneecaps.

Why bicker with husbands about dishes
when we’ve got
mountains of skulls to shine?

Labor and retribution we’ll share, not girlie secrets.

Brought up by dolls and monuments,
I have the bearings
of a horse and bitch,
I’m cement in tears.

You can spot my graves from afar,
marble like newborn skin.

Here, history comes to an end
like a movie
with rolling credits of headstones,
with nameless credits of mass graves.

Every ditch, every hill is suspect.

Pick me for a sister, Antigone.
In this suspicious land
I have a bright shovel of a face.

Notes on the Poem
We begin this week with Vazhyna Mort’s hauntingly beautiful poem, “To Antigone, A Dispatch,” from her 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected. “There are these official historical narratives. But there is also a way of remembering through feeling emotional history — not how it was, but how it felt.” Mort says in a brief NPR interview. In that same interview, she adds that it is difficult to paraphrase a great poem. The same proves true of Mort’s entire collection, a body of work that fearlessly takes on the task of transforming historical data—hundreds of thousands of nameless lives lost at the hands of wars, occupation, and displacement—into grief. “To Antigone, A Dispatch,” places Mort within a lineage of defiant heroines, unafraid to look at History in the face, summoning the power of witches and embracing the darkness needed to speak back to darkness with a new light. 

Of Music for the Dead and Resurrected, the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize judges say:  “’Here, history comes to an end / like a movie / with rolling credits of headstones,’ writes Valzhyna Mort, though the history doesn't end, but takes deep and memorable residence in the music of these poems. The collection offers many different kinds of poetry: from elegies to protest poems to moments of lyric intimacy. But in all of them there's an unmistakable emotion embodied in craft, one that continues to echo in our minds long after we finish the book. And this is perhaps the reason why Mort's striking pages about Belarus are ultimately poems about all of us: they set our remembering and our grief to inimitable music.”

Hear Valzhyna Mort read her poem here.

Read this this interview with Valzhyna Mort in Pen America. 

Listen to her read her poem “A State of Light State of Light," from her collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected here.

Read this review by Brian Dillon in 4Columns.

We were busy worshipping
words. Shipping worlds

through string. We held eardrums
to heartbeats to confirm

we were still alive. Someone unchained
the sun from its orbit. We watched it drift

like a curious child beyond the Oort cloud. Dimming
until it was another star in the night’s freckles

and even the day lost its name. We looked
at our hands with unfamiliarity. Trying to understand

the opaqueness of texture. Our moulting bones
discarded. Our new elbows reptilian.

The latest language stripped of meter,
rhyme, beauty. We were warned: there are no straight lines in nature.

Women sang new myths. Men planted
numbers in the soil to see if the fruits

could solve our problems. We invented
new gods and crooned when we remembered

how to brush each other’s hair. Music played
in a distant never. Insects danced

in a different hemisphere of our brain
or of the earth. We often tried to look up,

but we could only see our feet,
alien and hairless.

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week continues to feature this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted authors. We’re excited to share “Posthuman” by Yusuf Saadi from the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection, Pluviophile. Replete with ethereal imagery of night, clouds, and stars, Pluviophile teaches us to “dream-underwater.” It reconfigures our sensory perceptions of the world by creating a new physics of intimacy (“I wish I could touch you—/ not like two electrons repulsing…, but hold you how I hold a hand when I’m afraid—). In “Posthuman,” Saadi imagines a world past the threshold, a place in which humans are no longer humans yet retain a child-like curiosity towards the persistent mysteries of material phenomena.

Of Pluviophile, the judges say: “’There are whispers in the letters,’ writes Yusuf Saadi in poems that search everywhere for mystery, for magic, for beauty. And beauty speaks back, renews itself (and us) in these pages. Where other poets find moon, Saadi sees ‘moon's kneecap,’ where others see mere daffodils, Saadi asks: ‘Do daffodils dissolve in your / unpractised inner eye?’ This is the poet who is unafraid of play: ‘Outside of Kantian space and time, do you miss dancing / in dusty basements where sex was once phenomenal?’ This, too, is the poet unafraid of the daily grind, of ‘writing poetry at night / with the rust of our lives’. Pluviophile is a beautiful, refreshing debut.”

Learn more about Pluviophile in this interview. 

Listen to Saadi perform “Root Canal” in this CBC Arts illustrated video.

Here—beginning the unbeginning
owning nothing but that wounding
sense of waking to speak as I would

after the floods, then, after women unlike
Eve giving kind to the so-and-so, trying
to tell them it is time to be unnavigable,

after calling them back to what
the tongue cuts speaking the thing of
them rolled into stone

speaking I after all, after all theories
of abandonment priced and displayed,
the word was a moonlit knife

with those arrivants
lifting their hems to dance, toeless
with the footless child they invent

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week is excerpted from Canisia Lubrin's 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection, The Dyzgraphxst, a book-length lyrical poem investigating the fractured nature of the colonial subject: “I was not myself. I am not myself. My self resembles something having nothing to do with me,” Lubrin writes. Structured into seven acts, Lubrin’s extraordinary compositional feat turns historical wounds into polyvocal chants that can simultaneously hold violence and offer healing.

Of the The Dyzgraphxst, the judges say: “The Dyzgraphxst is Canisia Lubrin’s spectacular feat of architecture called a poem. Built with ‘I’—a single mark on the page, a voice, a blade, ‘a life-force soaring back’—and assembled over seven acts addressing language, grammar, sentence, line, stage, and world, the poet forms, invents, surprises, and sharpens life.??Generous, generating, and an abundance of rigour. A wide and widening ocean of feeling are the blueprints of this book. It is shaped to be ‘the shape of the shape / of the shape of a thing that light curves over time / length to width to depth and all of us its information.’” 

Listen to Canisia Lubrin read from and discuss The Dyzgraphxst here.

Read an interview on her role as Room Contest’s poetry judge here.