Angela Costi
Read Angela’s contribution to this journal. The two poems, which are deliberately threaded throughout the essay, are in An Embroidery of Old Maps and New (Making Lace and Kinaesthetic Grace).
Angela Costi is known as Aggeliki Kosti among the Cypriot-Greek diaspora. She is a graduate of both Law and Professional Writing and Editing. She has worked as a community lawyer in the social justice sector and as a community artist with a focus on human rights 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. In 2009, she travelled to Japan with support from the Australian Council to work on an international collaboration with the Stringraphy Ensemble.
In Cyprus, Angela’s maternal grandmother skilfully created the renowned Lefkarathika embroidery. However, both her parents left Cyprus for Australia to escape poverty, civil unrest and imminent war. These experiences have inspired An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, her fifth poetry collection.
Read more about Angela and watch her poetry videos here.
Ebooks available
Angela Costi
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 back
and 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.
Winner Greek Australian Cultural League Poetry Book Prize (in English) 2022
MARCH 2021 | 9781925950243 | Paperback | 210 x 146 mm | 96 pp