
Careless Seamstress
Kwame Dawes
(Foreword by)Description
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.
Product Details
Publisher | University of Nebraska Press |
Publish Date | March 01, 2019 |
Pages | 96 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781496214126 |
Dimensions | 9.0 X 6.0 X 0.2 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
-- (2/5/2019 12:00:00 AM)
"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 -- (9/14/2018 12:00:00 AM)
"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-- (3/1/2019 12:00:00 AM)
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