Alterations
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Transit Books
Publishing:21st Aug '25
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 21st August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
"In the city where I was born there is a collective of women taking apart donated wedding dresses. Seam ripping and taking off lace, uprooting stitches and unstringing beads—one by one by hand in their spare time."
A collective of women gathers to painstakingly turn wedding dresses into burial garments for infants. “Like many collectives whose existence and skills might seem unfathomable, most of us won’t know about them until there is a need to know,” writes Winrock. It is when confronted with the loss of her own unborn twin child that Winrock learns of their transformative work and begins to create a garment herself—made of language. Threading together stories of textiles and texts, from the first space suits and the seamstresses who made them, to Emily Dickinson’s famous white dress, to the Steinian rhythms of Goodnight Moon, Winrock constructs and reconstructs an essay that might begin to accommodate devastating loss. A work of process and possibility, Alterations enacts the hidden labors of mourning.Praise for Cori WInrock:
“This heartbreaking, unusual, and precise collection [Little Envelope of Earth Conditions] treats grief with all the complexity it deserves."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“This is a heartbreaking, beautiful book, yes. But also one in which grief lights the page, as the poet tells us: ‘What is grief but a syllable that accumulates / us of our gravity.’ Having known loss, what does she learn? What knowledge is shared here? Knowledge is in the questions. Winrock is a brilliant lyric poet who shares: all we say, we say in a body. Nothing can be said outside it. What is the lyric poet doing in this book? She grieves and sings. She whispers about mothers, about daughters, she composes elegies, pastorals. ‘Our bodies have been exposed to all sorts of things.
ISBN: 9798893389012
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
120 pages