Your Body Is War

Mahtem Shiferraw

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781496214133
• eBook ISBN: 9781496214508
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Poetry
• Index: Literature

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 in Your Body Is War embodyelements of conflict, making them simultaneouslya place of destructionand of freedom.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Because the Body
• Swallowing 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