Ebook: The Careless Seamstress
Author: Dema Tjawangwa
- Tags: Poetry, Poetry--21st century, Poetry -- 21st century
- Series: African poetry book series
- Year: 2019
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- City: Lincoln;London
- Language: English
- epub
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;...