This panel of U-M faculty members will discuss Petra Kuppers’ recent poetry collection, PearlStitch (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016) as part of IRWG's Gender: New Works, New Questions series.

Participants:
Petra Kuppers (Author), Professor of English, Women's Studies, Art and Design, and Theatre
Naomi Andre, Associate Professor of Women's Studies, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Associate Director for Faculty at the Residential College
Melanie Yergeau, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature

“A pearl stitch is a chain stitch, also known as the basque knot. In this garlandy chain of poems, Petra Kuppers interknits a mythology of heroines, natural wonders, marvelously slippery identities, personal struggles and exultations, but also acknowledges the violence by which text-making and life-making takes place in our world, whereby the “endless piston that drives the needle into the skin,” looping and connecting, is also the mechanism of our most elaborate cultural efflorescence. A beautiful meditation on the labor of making at all levels, PearlStitch stabs out a love letter to the love that fuels our creative surges in spite of all urges toward its perversion by capital” - Maria Damon“A pearl stitch is a chain stitch, also known as the basque knot. In this garlandy chain of poems, Petra Kuppers interknits a mythology of heroines, natural wonders, marvelously slippery identities, personal struggles and exultations, but also acknowledges the violence by which text-making and life-making takes place in our world, whereby the “endless piston that drives the needle into the skin,” looping and connecting, is also the mechanism of our most elaborate cultural efflorescence. A beautiful meditation on the labor of making at all levels, PearlStitch stabs out a love letter to the love that fuels our creative surges in spite of all urges toward its perversion by capital” - Maria Damon

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