Description
In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Shiferraw calls us to carve out space for the multitudes of selves we carry when we migrate across boundaries of body, language, and land. With momentum, giving name to everything in her path from the longing that comes with migration to her beloved eucalyptus tree, she blurs physical and temporal borders, paying homage to ancestors past, present, and future. Shiferraw writes unapologetically against erasure, against invisibility, instead creating a space that holds grief lovingly, that can tend to the wounds held and held in the endlessly-traveling body. Brilliant with abundance and texture, Shiferraw's poems dismantle the empire's sterile use of language, both historical and present.
In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Mahtem Shiferraw builds a home within her poems, attentively naming those who exist within them out of invisibility and into the radiant light: "We walk / in unison too: our backs bending at once, / our arms breaking, our abdomens / kicked into silence, thighs bleeding. Through / this I ask; am I still lit? And they, again /...what else would you be-"
National Advertising: Academy of American Poets Newsletter
Excerpts in various journals including Barrow Street Journal and Prairie Schooner.
Outreach to Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and Kweli Journal, among others. Spring book announcements submitted to Publishers Weekly.
eBook will be available on the publication date. eBook ISBN will be included on all press materials and on BOA's website. BOA and author will promote eBook on social media.
Promotion through author's website (), Instagram(@mahtem_shiferraw), and Twitter (@MShiferraw). Online/social media campaign: Extensive promotion through BOA's website, blog, e-newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. Giveaway and takeover planned through BOA's Instagram.
Buy-ins to relevant academic conferences, trade shows, and relevant publications. Currently considering: American Library Association Annual Meeting, CBSD Sales and Academic catalogs, etc.
About the Author
Mahtem Shiferraw is a writer and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, including Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, Poets.org, The 2River View, Luna Luna Magazine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Numero Cinq, and more. Her short story "The River" received an Honorable Mention at Glimmer Train's Open Fiction Contest. In 2016, she won the Sillerman Prize for African Poets and her full-length collection, Fuchsia, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. Her poetry chapbook, Behind Walls & Glass, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her most recent collection, Your Body Is War, is out now from the University of Nebraska Press. She has served as editor for Atlas and Alice, The Bleeding Lion, The Hunger Mountain, and more. She is the founder of Anaphora Arts, a nonprofit organization working to advance the works of writers and artists of color. She has served as a jury member for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the Lucy Munro Brooker Prize, among others. She is a Pushcart prize nominee, and her work has been anthologized widely. In 2018, she received the Imani Award for Artistic Excellence from Harvard University. As of 2020, she also serves on the Editorial Board of World Literature Today. She holds an MFA from Vermont College.
Reviews
Praise for Your Body Is War
"This is a collection of harrowing, prismatic lyrics made by severances and war and possessed by memory and place. In a language that dilates between the epic and the humble, nearly invisible, Mahtem Shiferraw does not once allow readers to imagine that war is anything but bodied, personal, inherited. Shiferraw's work is elemental, brilliant, fierce, and with mystery and exactitude, she pushes language past itself and into breathtaking resonances."
- Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
"Elegant and heart-wrenching, these poems possess a powerful voice that travels across oceans to reconnect with the language and stories of Ethiopia, Mahtem Shiferraw's homeland. Your Body Is War speaks poignantly about the inherited historical traumas, the ache and beauty of memory, and the strength it takes to endure the wounds of a nation, of a family, of a conflicted self."
- Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood
Praise for Fuchsia
"Fuchsia, culled from robust life and a finely tuned imagination, captures mysteries of the heart and mind alongside everyday rituals. Each poem dares us line by line, and suddenly we're inside the delicate mechanism of a deep song. The magical, raw, bittersweet duende of Fuchsia speaks boldly. The personal history and emotional architecture of Ethiopia and Eritrea reside in every portentous poem here. But the stories, each shaped and textured by true feeling, are also ours because they beckon to us."
- Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Emperor of Water Clocks
"In sometimes startlingly precise, and always musical, language, Shiferraw writes of her childhood in Ethiopia and of her contemporary life in Los Angeles with clarity, insight, and courage. Whether she is writing about butchering a sheep, uncles disappearing, a mother's mystical definition of self, of war, of poverty, of Kalashnikovs, or of hair, the words on these pages 'rummage' until they explode-into beauty."
- Gail Wronsky, author of So Quick Bright Things
"These poems are always informed with a bittersweet sense of exile, of witness, and of a properly ambivalent stance toward the bewildering consumerist culture in which the writer now finds herself. Yet Shiferraw's poetry is also suffused with wonder-richly associative, Whitmanic in its linguistic energy and totally complex, shifting without warning from wit to gravity, from self-reflection to lyric abandon. Fuchsia is a richly promising debut."
- David Wojahn, author of World Tree
"Color weaves through the collection, but in 'Synesthesia,' colors shoot up like flares to illuminate the trauma of fleeing home. . . . Gifted with synesthesia, the poet knows the world through color. Through her complex use of color, Shiferraw reveals home, made again through the action of memory, lending heartache, depth, and comfort to our lives."
- Mary Catherine Ford, World Literature Today
"[Fuchsia] is deeply sensual: full of color, sense memories, and small details of life."
- Alex Dueben, The RumpusBook Information
ISBN 9781950774906
Author Mahtem Shiferraw
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint BOA Editions, Limited
Publisher BOA Editions, Limited
