Zimbabwean life, with its griefs and contradictions, sits at the centre of Rutendo Chichaya’s debut poetry collection, Anchored Stitches. Across 80 pages, Chichaya writes about unemployment, injustice, womanhood, motherhood, mourning, love, and the ordinary experiences that reveal the pressures of a society in distress. The collection moves between the personal and political, asking what it means to endure when both private lives and public systems are fractured.

Chichaya is a writer, poet, and blogger from Harare whose work has appeared in anthologies and literary publications. Before Anchored Stitches, her short story “Visiting Hour” was a finalist for the 2021 Hamwe Short Story Contest, while “Herald of the New Times” was shortlisted for the 2020 Intwasa Short Story Prize. She also hosts Ihwi, a podcast focused on storytelling.

Her poems are unafraid of anger. At the collection’s launch in Harare, critic and writer Jacqueline Nyathi described Chichaya’s voice as carrying an “inferno” of grief, despair, and rage directed at oppressive state structures and patriarchy. Yet the poems do not remain in despair. They also make space for nature, tradition, love, passion, reclamation, and recovery; the things that allow people to remain connected to one another.

That movement between wounding and repair gives Anchored Stitches its emotional force. Chichaya writes about a country’s difficulties without losing sight of the people living through them: women navigating expectations, families carrying grief, workers confronting uncertainty, and communities finding ways to endure. The collection’s title becomes a metaphor for the ongoing work of holding things together.

Published by Carnelian Heart Publishing in February 2026, Anchored Stitches is a debut concerned with what survives after rupture and with the possibility that poetry can help name the wounds while making room for healing.

Here’s the synopsis:

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.

 

Buy Anchored Stitches here.