Description

Laurie Ann Guerrero's expansive fifth poetry collection, REDWORK, is a meditation on a woman's role in work and family, ancestral wisdom, and the subversive nature of female art.

Interwoven with images of the author's intricate redwork embroidery--striking red thread on light textiles--these poems explore reproductive justice, violence, gender dynamics, internalized sexism, and mothers and mothering, bound by the belief that "the red thread ties me, like a vein, to all my mothers." From a paradigm-shifting slap at a Brownies troop meeting to eating a rattlesnake to a great-grandmother rising from her coffin, Guerrero's precise, visceral voice threads the imagery of embroidery through unexpected forms. Rhythmic stitches echo in her repetitions, leaving phrases that stay with the reader: "How quietly our trust began."

REDWORK is a love letter to the women who came before, a cry against gendered violence, and an elegy for the ways colonialism warps our lives.