The Careless Seamstress
Tjawangwa Dema
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Imprint: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 03/2019
Pages: 78
Subject: Poetry
eBook ISBN: 9781496215307
DESCRIPTION
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
REVIEWS
"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
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