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

ISBN

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

ISBN