An Embroidery of Old Maps and New

Overview

I can see how I carry Yiayia’s war in the ample dunes of my belly, the moment she smelt the guns, she pinched the candle’s wick,gathered the startled shadows of her children,flung my baby-mother onto her backand sprinted towards the neutral moon—Migration and the memories of women’s traditions are woven throughout these poems. Angela Costi brings the world of Cyprus to Australia. Her mother encounters animosity on Melbourne’s trams as Angela learns to thread words in ways that echo her grandmother’s embroidery. Here are poems that sing their way across the seas and map histories.

Reviews

"These powerful, poignant poems embody the experience of generations of women, the dignity of their labour, their affirmation of life as a journey into uncharted realms, where they must adapt their skills to sustain their children in an unfamiliar culture: a challenge to be embraced wholeheartedly, bodily. The thread of a unique Greek-Cypriot embroidery tradition morphs into the thread of language celebrating the continuity and manifold richness of life in fluid, intricate patterns of ancestry and migration, the eloquence of words, hands, thread." —Jena Woodhouse, News from the Village: Travels in Rural Greece

"Angela Costi threads the colours and textures of heart and humanity through fabric drawn across geographies. Cut from one cloth, she stitches complexity of journey, place and people. Now and then. Anchored and looping. Her yarn and needle weave a taut finely detailed tapestry. This braid of head, heart and hand is to be treasured, passed on, a witness to events that must not be disappeared." —berni m. janssen, author of between wind and water (in a vulnerable place)

Author Biography

Angela Costi is known as Aggeliki Kosti among the Cypriot-Greek diaspora. She is a graduate of both Law and Professional Writing and Editing, and has worked as a lawyer and community artist with a focus on social justice issues. Since 1994, Angela's poetry, stories, plays, essays and reviews, with travel and migration at their heart, have been widely published nationally and internationally. In 1995, she received an award from the Australian National Languages and Literacy Board to study Ancient Drama in Greece. She has also travelled to Japan on a writing fellowship.