Autumn House Press Poetry Prize – serie

Laurie Ann Guerrero’s expansive fifth poetry collection, REDWORK, is a meditation on a woman’s role in work and family, ancestral wisdom, and the subversive nature of female art. Interwoven with eight images of the author’s intricate redwork embroidery—striking red thread on light textiles—these poems explore reproductive justice, violence, gender dynamics, internalized sexism, and mothers and mothering, bound by the belief that “the red thread ties me, like a vein, to all my mothers.” From a paradigm-shifting slap at a Brownies troop meeting to eating a rattlesnake to a great-grandmother rising from her coffin, Guerrero’s precise, visceral voice threads the imagery of embroidery through unexpected forms. Rhythmic stitches echo in her repetitions, leaving phrases that stay with the reader: “How quietly our trust began.” REDWORK is a love letter to the women who came before, a cry against gendered violence, and an elegy for the ways colonialism warps our lives.