Anchored Stitches

In this powerful debut, Rutendo Chichaya gathers the textures of Zimbabwean life - its endurance, grief and quiet triumphs - into a lyrical tapestry of voices that confront loss, labour and longing. From the quiet corridors of unemployment and injustice to the delicate patterns of womanhood, motherhood and mourning, this collection reveals what it means to live and love amid rupture. With lyrical precision and unflinching honesty, she examines a nation's wounds and a people's will to endure. Her poems move between the domestic and the divine, the personal and the political, weaving flame lilies into scars and turning even bleeding into a form of healing.

Anchored Stitches is a testament to resilience: a gathering of voices that refuse to be undone, finding beauty, dignity and wholeness in the act of sewing life back together. Rutendo's voice is resolute yet tender, transforming silence into speech and wounding into beauty. In her hands, poetry becomes both needle and thread, mending, binding and remembering.

~ Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure, Poet

In these poems, Rutendo Chichaya cuts her own heart open and lays it before the reader-and in so doing, offers an invitation to the reader to be sliced open, too. This is the confident voice of an eloquent Zimbabwean, one who speaks with an "inferno in her mouth" of grief, despair, and rage against evil state structures and the patriarchy... But who also wields language to remind us of the rhythms of the natural world, of tradition, of love and passion, of "reclamation, redemption and recovery"-the things that hold our souls together. This beautiful collection is to be read, treasured, quoted from, and read again.

~ Jacqueline Nyathi, Harare Review of Books