Description
Book Synopsis
Your Body Is War contemplates the psychology of the female human body, looking at the ways it exists and moves in the world, refusing to be contained in the face of grief and trauma. Bold and raw, Mahtem Shiferraw’spoems explore what the woman’s body has to do to survive and persevere in the world, especially in the aftermath of abuse.
A groundbreaking collection, the poems inYour Body Is Warembodyelements of conflict, making them simultaneouslya place of destructionand of freedom.
Trade Review"As Shiferraw refuses silence, rejects erasure, she braids the pain of women she loves into her poetry. Indeed, the poet writes on a continuum, refusing boundaries. And in so doing,
Your Body Is War gives the reader stunning poems that re-create the pain and triumph of women the world would rather unsee."—Mary Catherine Ford,
World Literature Today“Elegant and heart-wrenching, these poems possess a powerful voice that travels across oceans to reconnect with the language and stories of Ethiopia, Mahtem Shiferraw’s homeland.
Your Body Is War speaks poignantly about the inherited historical traumas, the ache and beauty of memory, and the strength it takes to endure the wounds of a nation, of a family, of a conflicted self.”—Rigoberto González, author of
What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood“This is a collection of harrowing, prismatic lyrics made by severances and war and possessed by memory and place. In a language that dilates between the epic and the humble, nearly invisible, Mahtem Shiferraw does not once allow readers to imagine that war is anything but bodied, personal, inherited. Shiferraw’s work is elemental, brilliant, fierce; and with mystery and exactitude, she pushes language past itself and into breathtaking resonances. There are lines I will never forget for their power and for what they reveal about how this poet’s thinking shapes the terms of her and her speakers’ survival(s). ‘I am yellow, / I have yellow in me // and it does not / let me die.’ I believe these poems are part of that survival—a trace, a strategy, a prayer record assembled in the ruin of Then that is perpetual, that is also always Now.”—Aracelis Girmay, author of
The Black MariaTable of ContentsSwallowing Suns
Your Body Is War (I)
Madhouse
The Art of Invisibility
The Suicide Chamber
The Tree of My Deaths
Behind Walls and Glass
Your Body Is War (II)
Ash and Blue
Body of Punishments
Like a Lover’s Quarrel
Water
The Curse of Ishmael
Black and Blue
Death by Trains
The Memory of the Body
Your Body Is War (III)
Genesis
The Old Tree
The Wrong Kind of Dream
Your Body Is War (IV)
Journey with Dante
At the Mad Man’s
Water Dreams
The Body Book
Conversations with Self
The Yellow Woman
The Fruit Mother
Ghost Procession
Your Body Is War (V)
Acknowledgments
