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Whitework
Poetry. The poems in WHITEWORK, Ashley McWaters' debut collection, explore sewing as synecdoche for the whole of women's work, particularly the creative work traditionally deemed acceptable for women. Braiding together the myth of Athena and Arachne, a Victorian teacher-pupil relationship, and the act of writing itself, this pristine and haunted collection explores concerns about ego and alter-ego, the shock of beauty, and the nature of female creation. Devoted to formal experiment, and taking up erasure (both textual and historical) as a central motif, the book acts simultaneously as homage and artifact. At once preserving the language of the female and its historic omission, WHITEWORK celebrates the unspoken through supernatural means--with the muted vocabulary of a Poetry Queen. If you think it's gentle, do look again; McWaters has a sharp needle. Reader, beware.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published October 25, 2009
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April 5, 2011Gripping tale of McWaters' infiltration of a white supremacist group.
No. The work is the stitch in the skeleton of a story in fragments of a young woman's initiation into a sort of workhouse(?) that exists in an indeterminate interval in time and place. The various I's giving dramatic monologues tend to all give way to a larger sower/spinner archetypical figure. Read this in incredibly blurry fashion while on a series of flights. Found myself most interested in those passages which expand the resonance of the act of piercing to join. Working similar vein as things like Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart.
No. The work is the stitch in the skeleton of a story in fragments of a young woman's initiation into a sort of workhouse(?) that exists in an indeterminate interval in time and place. The various I's giving dramatic monologues tend to all give way to a larger sower/spinner archetypical figure. Read this in incredibly blurry fashion while on a series of flights. Found myself most interested in those passages which expand the resonance of the act of piercing to join. Working similar vein as things like Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart.
Displaying 1 of 1 review