How to Thread a Needle by Miriam Weinstein

In her new chapbook Miriam Weinstein guides us on a journey through “memory’s markers, unpredictable/and selective.”  We travel with her though landscapes of loss and praise as she navigates family history and explores the role of memory in reclaiming that history.

Even the most difficult of terrains—desire, doubt, faith—are constantly grounded through, and anchored in, the natural world: in “pink fists” of crabapple blossom and tangles of rose briar; through ripe corn, house sparrows, columbine and tulips.  Here, in the end, memory and family history are bound beautifully together by love—a love that threads its needle through the generations.

–Jude Nutter, author of Dead Reckoning and other collections.

“I am a thread binding truths,” says Miriam Weinstein in “Woman Wandering,” and the same could be said of this book.  Weinstein illuminates the apparently ordinary — rings, leaves, potholders, pearls, fishing line — so that we see in them some wildness that transcends the domestic.  The poems in How to Thread a Needle together offer a unified composite of a life experienced within the succession of generations and continually refreshed by the natural world.  Readers will find in this family of poems a deeply habitable world.

–Thomas R. Smith, author of Storm Island, Windy Day at Kabekona, and other books

The title of Miriam Weinstein‘s latest collection, How to Thread a Needle, reflects the intense attention she gave to making each one of the 28 beautiful and emotionally wise poems. The title also suggests that the narrator has found a way through times of  challenge. Her voice is confident, yet vulnerable and inquiring. The themes–or threads–stitching the collection together include loss of a love; embrace of family pleasures and imperfections; issues of privation and privilege in the community; and encounters with the natural world.  Miriam’s ability to see and describe flowers, gardens, lakes, trees, and clouds enriches the experience of her poetry.  Birds, many birds, appear here and there like charms, contributing to the color, sound, and spirit of  the poetry. A reader will become happily lost and at home in this intimate and satisfying chapbook.

–Margaret Hasse, author of Shelter and Between Us, among others