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New York

By Valzhyna Mort Valzhyna Mort

Translated By Franz Wright and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright Read the translator's notes

new york, madame,

is a monument to a city

it is

TA-DA

a gigantic pike

whose scales

bristled up stunned

and what used to be just smoke

found a fire that gave it birth

champagne foam

melted into metal

glass rivers

flowing upwards

and things you won't tell to a priest

you reveal to a cabdriver

even time is sold out

when to the public's "wow" and "shhh"

out of a black top hat

a tailed magician

is pulling new york out

by the ears of skyscrapers

Source: Poetry (April 2007).

Biography

Born in Minsk, Belarus (part of the former Soviet Union), in 1981, Valzhyna Mort has been praised as “[a] risen star of the international poetry world” by the Irish Times. When she moved to the United States in 2005, she had already published her first book, I’m as Thin as Your Eyelashes, and was known across the world as an electrifying reader of her poems. Her debut collection in America, Factory of Tears, has received . . .

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