Tjawangwa Dema

Careless Seamstress (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Nebraska
• Seitenzahl: 78
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. März 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781496215307
• Artikelnr.: 55643514

Autorenporträt

Tjawangwa Dema is a poet from Botswana, an arts administrator, and a teaching artist in Bristol, England. Her chapbook, Mandible, was published in the box set Seven New Generation African Poets, and her poems have appeared in the New Orleans Review, the Cordite Review, and the Rio Grande Review.

Inhaltsangabe

Foreword, by Kwame Dawes    
Acknowledgments    
The Elegy of the Half-Done Quilt    
Apoptosis    
Red    
Geography    
Atropos    
Taxonomy    
The Borderlands    
Ventriloquist    
Ellen West    
Mothering    
Vesta    
Nostalgia    
The Careless Seamstress    
The Three-Body Problem    
Lent    
Not No Body    
Women Like You    
Dreams    
Ovaria    
Before the Wedding    
Lethe    
Mutineer    
You Who Have Forgotten    
Just Because    
At the Last Sound    
Winter Tortoise    
Domboshaba    
Self-Portrait with a Missing Tongue    
A Benediction for Climbing Boys    
Shibboleth    
Sea    
The Parable of the Tree    
Mama    
In the House of Mourning    
Fetching    
Batting    
Mourning at Night    
First Algebra    
The Other    
Stole (Chain of Sorrow)     
Lares    
Fish Camp    
Naomi    
White Noise    
On Saying There Is No God    
Homonym    
Notes