Alterations

Alterations

$17.95

Cori Winrock

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.

Alterations is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

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**Praise for AlterAtions:**

"A radiant evocation of longing... Winrock creates a haunting meditation on grief, on being caught in an obsessive circularity of thinking and feeling, and on wishing, achingly, to undo a painful narrative."—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for COri WInROck:

“This heartbreaking, unusual, and precise collection [Little Envelope of Earth Conditions] treats grief with all the complexity it deserves."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“This is a heartbreaking, beautiful book, yes. But also one in which grief lights the page, as the poet tells us: ‘What is grief but a syllable that accumulates / us of our gravity.’ Having known loss, what does she learn? What knowledge is shared here? Knowledge is in the questions. Winrock is a brilliant lyric poet who shares: all we say, we say in a body. Nothing can be said outside it. What is the lyric poet doing in this book? She grieves and sings. She whispers about mothers, about daughters, she composes elegies, pastorals. ‘Our bodies have been exposed to all sorts of things. // The stars don’t believe in weeping us / to sleep.’ This knowledge is desolate, but it frees us: ‘our bodies pinned open into the last kind blues.’ This is the last frontier: ‘Listen, listen— /every time I’ve tried to bring our baby back // to the ground in our old city.’ I love the duality of this voice. Its tenderness and its ringing grief.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa