Guerrero-Peirano, Victoria / Spicer & Spicer (trs.): Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress

Cardboard House Press, paperback

Translated by: Honora Spicer & Anastatia Spicer

Publication Date: May 2, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 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."

In this beautifully woven translation, Victoria Guerrero-Peirano’s Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress is a vindication of our mothers and grandmothers, who toiled in the dark, sewing and knitting, and of all the women in factories trying to satisfy our hunger for fast fashion. With each line, Guerrero-Peirano rips through the seams of sexist and classist distinctions that elevate fine art above handicraft, professors above factory workers, and writers above seamstresses. From the luminous frayed threads emerge the shared silences and rage of these women, which, woven together, form a sturdy but fluid textile that invites us to consider and acknowledge the price of their invisible labor.—Rosa Alcalá, author of YOU

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