Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress/Diario de una costurera proletaria by Victoria Guerrero-Peirano (trans. Anastatia & Honora Spicer)

Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress/Diario de una costurera proletaria $17.50

Co-published with Cardboard House Press, this book of threads binds the autobiographical and the bureaucratic, the maternal body and the factory floor. In fierce and tender lines, contemporary Peruvian poet Victoria Guerrero-Peirano pierces intergenerational silences with erupting screams. Three scenes probe the precarity of textile lineages tensioned against patriarchal violence and neoliberal industrial orders. “I leave words,” a daughter speaks in the face of her mother’s tactile engrossment, tangling with doubt what it means to “know enough” by a life of letters. Of immigrant seamstresses killed in one of the deadliest industrial disasters in United States history, the poet asks: “can poetry speak?” And a state’s forced sterilizations inhibit women from practicing traditional weaving by kallwa, shaping a verse of testimony. In the face of multiple unfolding violences and ruptures in practices of world-making, the Diary declares, “We seamstresses are timeless.”


“one of the most destabilizing poets of contemporary Peruvian literature …provoking us and demanding that we reconsider our notions of body, language, and nation.”
                                          —Sara Uribe, author of Antígona González

Victoria Guerrero-Peirano (Lima, Peru) is a poet, researcher and essayist. In 2020, she was awarded the National Literature Award in Peru with the transdisciplinary essay Y la muerte no tendrá dominio and in 2023 she won the Proart prize for her book La mujer. She has published ten books of poetry, among them Todas las poetas peruanas tienen cáncer (2024), I am no body(2021), Diario de una costurera proletaria(2019), Zurita + Guerrero (a duo with the poet Raúl Zurita, 2014) and Berlín (2011). She has also published the novella Un golpe de dados (novelita sentimental pequeño burguesa) (2014). Guerrero-Peirano holds a doctorate in Literature and a masters in Gender Studies. She forms part of Proyecto Trans.arch: archivos en transición (Project Trans.arch: archives in transition), she is a researcher with the independent project Mapa de Escritoras Peruanas (Map of Peruvian Women Writers), she is a founder of the activist group Comando Plath and she directs the editorial Intermezzo Tropical. She cares for Varela and Berlin and teaches at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. 
 
Anastatia Spicer is a weaver. www.anastatia.work

Honora Spicer is a writer and experiential educator. Her documentary poetry, essays and literary translations from Spanish have appeared in The Boston Review, Jacket2, Tripwire, Asymptote, and elsewhere. www.honoraspicer.com. 

Cardboard House Press is a 501c3 nonprofit organization founded in 2014, dedicated to the creation of Spanish-English bilingual spaces through small-press publishing, community workshops, and bilingual events. We publish Latin American and Spanish poetry in translation, with a focus on innovative contemporary poetry, historical avant-garde, and social poetics. Our work acts as a platform for the exchange of ideas, uplifting new meanings that provoke connection and social action.