Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 inunexpected 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;
Trade Review
"With a natural approach to the physicality of her characters' lives and struggles, Botswanan poet Tjawangwa Dema uses her work to explore large questions of gender, identity and labor. The pieces in The Careless Seamstress live at the intersection of these themes, showing how one moment or action brilliantly encapsulates the whole."—Noah Cruickshank, Shelf Awareness starred review
“Tjawangwa Dema’s poems are as bold, roving, and insistent as they are delicate and incisive. The Careless Seamstress is a ravishing debut.”—Tracy K. Smith, U.S. poet laureate and author of Wade in the Water: Poems
“These poems open the archive of identity and the mysteries of the body at one and the same time. In richly embossed detail, events, lost evenings and the erotics of history are unveiled. In these narratives, a young woman’s life moves between danger and custom: her body knows silence is a language/ any woman can learn to speak. This work brings the reader to new places and age-old insights. These are moving, eloquent and compelling poems.”—Eavan Boland, author of A Woman Without a Country: Poems
Table of Contents
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
