Embroideries

Burcu Sahin (trans. Jennifer Hayashida)

In Burcu Sahin’s acclaimed poetry debut, Embroideries, poem-threads are using memory, fragments, and loss of meaning as a way of speaking. Mothers and daughters take turns in sewing and caring for one another as they abandon and return to their work with longing and grief, “memory of the palm / hardens the skin.”

This first full-length English-language book of Sahin, translated by Jennifer Hayashida, is finely wrought without sentimentality: what gradually appears in these poems is a genealogy of laboring daughters and mothers who are also daughters – their care, political commitments, and loyalties. Through the dual concepts of sewing and language the poems account for women whose lives and solidarities have not been documented in official histories or institutions, but in stitches.