Your Body Is War

Mahtem Shiferraw is a poet and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea and now divides her time between Los Angeles and Addis Ababa. She is the author of the poetry collection Fuchsia (Nebraska, 2016) and the chapbook Behind Walls and Glass.

"As Shiferraw refuses silence, rejects erasure, she braids the pain of women she loves into her poetry. Indeed, the poet writes on a continuum, refusing boundaries. And in so doing, Your Body Is War gives the reader stunning poems that re-create the pain and triumph of women the world would rather unsee."-Mary Catherine Ford, World Literature Today “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 GonzÁlez, author of What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood “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. There are lines I will never forget for their power and for what they reveal about how this poet’s thinking shapes the terms of her and her speakers’ survival(s). ‘I am yellow, / I have yellow in me // and it does not / let me die.’ I believe these poems are part of that survival-a trace, a strategy, a prayer record assembled in the ruin of Then that is perpetual, that is also always Now.”-Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria

• 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