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"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.
About the author
Cori A. Winrock is a poet and multimedia essayist/artist. Her second collection of poetry,
Little Envelope of Earth Conditions (2020), was awarded Editor's Choice for the Alice James Books Prize. Her debut book,
This Coalition of Bones (Kore Press), received the Freund Prize for a first collection. Winrock holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah where she was a 2019-2020 Tanner Humanities Fellow. Formerly an Assistant Professor at Cleveland Institute of Art, she recently joined the Creative Writing faculty at Western Washington University where she teaches hybrid forms and other experimental literature classes.
Summary
Alterations examines the grief of losing an unborn twin child through a lens of alteration and adaptation, connecting narratives of textiles and texts—from spacesuits and burial garments to Emily Dickinson’s poetic fragments and GOODNIGHT MOON—and the unexpected garments rendered from and contained within personal tragedy. The existence of one is a constant reminder of the other.
Using Winrock’s own lexicon of variant sentences, Alterations threads together seemingly disparate narrative themes of text and textile into an elliptical and lyric examination of the invisibility of women’s labor and maternal grief.
Alterations is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.
