Drawing upon social history, myth, and visionary poetics, (S)worn State(s) remembers, challenges, and reimagines ‘worn’ narratives of women’s experiences in the context of shifting historical and cultural landscapes in Ireland in the Irish Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 and beyond.
In an extended poetic conversation, Kimberly Campanello, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, and Dimitra Xidous created a suite of individual poems before co-authoring the accompanying long poem Her-Text that reinscribes and ‘swears’ an oath to new and unfolding ‘states’ of being and making. The poems were created in Dublin, York, Achill Island and at the Boyne Valley, a prehistoric landscape dating from the Neolithic period. Across the poems, the texture of the language emerges from the Donegal Gaeltacht, Greece, Italy and North America. In 2019, the project received the inaugural Markievicz Award for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, allowing the poets generous space to come together and create this work.
It is available to pre-order from The Salvage Press (launching December).
author photo Ror Conaty