Confession

Kelli is much more thorough about her confessions, but every now and then an amateur can get a few things out in the open, right? So here goes:

I confess I purchased Valzhyna Mort's Factory of Tears entirely because she appeared on the cover of Poets and Writers with her accordion. Her ACCORDION!

I confess that I then dropped the book onto a pile and neglected to so much as crack the spine for months, reading more than a dozen other books before so much as taking the Copper Canyon reply card out of its original location.

And finally, I confess that upon reading the first two lines of "Music of Locusts", I resolved to finish the book before I read even the back of a cereal box:

what I wouldn't give

to be a small freckle on the wind's nose

Most of the poems have the Belarusian on the left face. And I confess, using the names in the dedications to sound out the phonetics of that alphabet and hearing those few words of Belarusian I can work out in my head is bonus fun for me in this book.

Here's the poem "Teacher", in its English entirety (the all-lowercase look is from the original):

if you are going to be my teacher
you will have to become a tiger
so that you can bite my head off
and i'd have to follow you everywhere
trying very hard to get my head back

Good stuff. Recommended.

Also good stuff, and since I mentioned her today, Kelli posted some good learnings she recently acquired on presenting your own work in public. Also recommended.