Free or run

Anna Komar's poetry book is like a breath of pain. Despite the commonplaceness of this motif in the poet's artistic world, here it is perceived from a new perspective. “Release or run” is a call in which the social and the personal are intertwined into one, creating a creative credo – “to be stronger than circumstances”. That is why in the world that appears on the pages of the book as if behind bars, the poetic word feels like a breath of air. It cannot be taken away even in a musty prison or a motorcade, just as it is impossible to deprive one of inner freedom, unrestrained and boundless sincerity towards the world. This is precisely the feeling evoked by the poems written in 2018-2022, most of which took place for the poet within the borders of Belarus. Detentions on the streets of Minsk, beatings in a cell “on fours, where I was sixteenth,” evidence of the war in Ukraine, which is experienced not by abstract victims, but by close people, friends – all this creates a chronicle of time, conveyed through the perception of a young woman who, in a tortured and unfree world, does not lose, perhaps, the only right she has left – to be herself.