The Careless Seamstress
Title | The Careless Seamstress PDF eBook |
Author | Tjawangwa Dema |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 93 |
Release | 2019-03-01 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 1496214129 |
This dazzling debut announces a not-so-new voice: that of the spoken-word poet Tjawangwa Dema. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Dema’s collection, The Careless Seamstress, evokes the national and the subjective while reemphasizing that what is personal is always political. The girls and women in these poems are not mere objects; they speak, labor, and gaze back, with difficulty and consequence. The tropes are familiar, but in their animation they question and move in unexpected ways. The female body—as a daughter, wife, worker, cultural mutineer—moves continually across this collection, fetching water, harvesting corn, raising children, sewing, migrating, and spurning designations. Sewing is rendered subversive, the unsayable is weft into speech and those who are perhaps invisible in life reclaim their voice and leave evidence of their selves. As a consequence the body is rarely posed—it bleeds and scars; it ages; it resists and warns. The female gaze and subsequent voices suggest a different value system that grapples with the gendering of both physical and emotional labor, often through what is done, even and especially when this goes unnoticed or unappreciated. A body of work that examines the nature of power and resistance, The Careless Seamstress shows both startling clarity of purpose and capaciousness of theme. Using gender and labor as their point of departure, these poems are indebted to Dema’s relationship to language, intertextuality, and narrative. It is both assured and inquiring, a quietly complex skein that takes advantage of poetry’s capacity for the polyphonic.
The Careless Seamstress
Title | The Careless Seamstress PDF eBook |
Author | Tjawangwa Dema |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 94 |
Release | 2019-03-01 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 149621532X |
This dazzling debut announces a not-so-new voice: that of the spoken-word poet Tjawangwa Dema. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Dema’s collection, The Careless Seamstress, evokes the national and the subjective while reemphasizing that what is personal is always political. The girls and women in these poems are not mere objects; they speak, labor, and gaze back, with difficulty and consequence. The tropes are familiar, but in their animation they question and move in unexpected ways. The female body—as a daughter, wife, worker, cultural mutineer—moves continually across this collection, fetching water, harvesting corn, raising children, sewing, migrating, and spurning designations. Sewing is rendered subversive, the unsayable is weft into speech and those who are perhaps invisible in life reclaim their voice and leave evidence of their selves. As a consequence the body is rarely posed—it bleeds and scars; it ages; it resists and warns. The female gaze and subsequent voices suggest a different value system that grapples with the gendering of both physical and emotional labor, often through what is done, even and especially when this goes unnoticed or unappreciated. A body of work that examines the nature of power and resistance, The Careless Seamstress shows both startling clarity of purpose and capaciousness of theme. Using gender and labor as their point of departure, these poems are indebted to Dema’s relationship to language, intertextuality, and narrative. It is both assured and inquiring, a quietly complex skein that takes advantage of poetry’s capacity for the polyphonic.
The Careless Seamstress
Title | The Careless Seamstress PDF eBook |
Author | Tjawangwa Dema |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 115 |
Release | 2019-03-01 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 1496215303 |
This dazzling debut announces a not-so-new voice: that of the spoken-word poet Tjawangwa Dema. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Dema's collection, The Careless Seamstress, evokes the national and the subjective while reemphasizing that what is personal is always political. The girls and women in these poems are not mere objects; they speak, labor, and gaze back, with difficulty and consequence. The tropes are familiar, but in their animation they question and move in unexpected ways. The female body--as a daughter, wife, worker, cultural mutineer--moves continually across this collection, fetching water, harvesting corn, raising children, sewing, migrating, and spurning designations. Sewing is rendered subversive, the unsayable is weft into speech and those who are perhaps invisible in life reclaim their voice and leave evidence of their selves. As a consequence the body is rarely posed--it bleeds and scars; it ages; it resists and warns. The female gaze and subsequent voices suggest a different value system that grapples with the gendering of both physical and emotional labor, often through what is done, even and especially when this goes unnoticed or unappreciated. A body of work that examines the nature of power and resistance, The Careless Seamstress shows both startling clarity of purpose and capaciousness of theme. Using gender and labor as their point of departure, these poems are indebted to Dema's relationship to language, intertextuality, and narrative. It is both assured and inquiring, a quietly complex skein that takes advantage of poetry's capacity for the polyphonic.
Sacrament of Bodies
Title | Sacrament of Bodies PDF eBook |
Author | Romeo Oriogun |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 75 |
Release | 2020-03-01 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 1496219643 |
In this groundbreaking collection of poems, Sacrament of Bodies, Romeo Oriogun fearlessly interrogates how a queer man in Nigeria can heal in a society where everything is designed to prevent such restoration. With honesty, precision, tenderness of detail, and a light touch, Oriogun explores grief and how the body finds survival through migration.
When the Wanderers Come Home
Title | When the Wanderers Come Home PDF eBook |
Author | Patricia Jabbeh Wesley |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 126 |
Release | 2016-11-01 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 0803295030 |
Described by African scholar and literary critic Chielozona Eze as “one of the most prolific African poets of the twenty-first century,” Patricia Jabbeh Wesley composed When the Wanderers Come Home during a four-month visit to her homeland of Liberia in 2013. She gives powerful voice to the pain and inner turmoil of a homeland still reconciling itself in the aftermath of multiple wars and destruction. Wesley, a native Liberian, calls on deeply rooted African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to convey her grief. Autobiographical in nature, the poems highlight the hardships of a diaspora African and the devastation of a country and continent struggling to recover. When the Wanderers Come Home is a woman’s story about being an exile, a survivor, and an outsider in her own country; it is her cry for the Africa that is being lost in wars across the continent, creating more wanderers and world citizens.
Fuchsia
Title | Fuchsia PDF eBook |
Author | Mahtem Shiferraw |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 105 |
Release | 2016-03-01 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 1496203534 |
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Ethiopian American Mahtem Shiferraw's Fuchsia examines conceptions of the displaced, disassembled, and nomadic self. Embedded in her poems are colors, elements, and sensations that evoke painful memories related to deep-seated remnants of trauma, war, and diaspora. Yet rooted in these losses and dangers also lie opportunities for mending and reflecting, evoking a distinct sense of hope. Elegant and traditional, the poems in Fuchsia examine what it means to both recall the past and continue onward with a richer understanding.
Book of Days
Title | Book of Days PDF eBook |
Author | Emily Fox Gordon |
Publisher | Random House |
Pages | 322 |
Release | 2010-08-17 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0679604014 |
The sexual politics of a faculty wives dinner. The psychological gamesmanship of an inappropriate therapist. The emotional minefield of an extended family wedding . . . Whatever the subject, Emily Fox Gordon’s disarmingly personal essays are an art form unto themselves—reflecting and revealing, like mirrors in a maze, the seemingly endless ways a woman can lose herself in the modern world. With piercing humor and merciless precision, Gordon zigzags her way through “the unevolved paradise” of academia, with its dying breeds of bohemians, adulterers, and flirts, then stumbles through the perils and pleasures of psychotherapy, hoping to find a narrative for her life. Along the way, she encounters textbook feminists, partying philosophers, perfectionist moms, and an unlikely kinship with Kafka—in a brilliant collection of essays that challenge our sacred institutions, defy our expectations, and define our lives.