The language I wish to speak / isn't contained in words, writes Julia Cimafiejeva, while giving us these moving words of witness and testimony, compelling poems of kinship, of bravery and fear and reckoning: we came back for a visit, she writes, only cemetery crosses / waved at us with rags / of their embroidered towels. There is so much lyricism in this painful reckoning, the language itself uplifts even as it doubts itself in a time of great upheaval: I approach the territory of a foreign language / as a melancholy spy / I must steal a secret / of these strange hills. Poetry here doesn't just survive despite translation between languages, but because of it. And for that, my special gratitude is to Cimafiejeva's brilliant translators, Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib. The horrors of reality in today's Belarus, the beatings and tortures of prisoners, the eerie presence of Chernobyl disaster in these pages, all true, all heart-breaking, and all also somehow carried through to us by beautiful, memorable, unrelenting words. -Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic