Many of the poems in Valzhyna Mort’s collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected are experientially akin to watching someone break a major bone in front of you. Their visceral honesty and unflinching gaze demand that the reader contend with the horrors of life in Soviet Belarus. Her use of repetition can become hypnotic, snaring the reader in a web of Mort’s making. Under the blank stares of elder relatives, children in her poems explore a world they don’t quite realize has been devastated before their time. Violence in Mort’s work is as atmospheric as the drifting radiation from Chernobyl. With too many dead to count, Mort’s catechismic and hallucinogenic pieces create a ritual of grieving imbued with an unsinkable optimism.