Thread: A Memoir in Woven Poems by Janet McMillan Rives

This refreshing memoir weaves poetry and prose into a tapestry depicting a childhood of wonder and joy bound to the days of “our long and lucky lives,” as Janet McMillan Rives can write now. With chapters moving around in time and place, with lines of poetry that sharpen the focus, she takes us vividly into what the child once saw as a cathedral of trees, to explore memory and beauty and poetry itself, to discover the connections threading past to present. In that green cathedral, the child wonders what friends and details and experiences she will remember when she’s old. This tender, lyrical book is the answer.

–Meg Files, author of The Beasts.

“Only connect!” wrote E.M. Forster. “Live in fragments no longer.” Janet McMillan Rives exemplifies this calling. “I remember connections,” she declares, and it’s true. Rives’ recollections are painterly. She shows us “blue green agave, muted orchid skies at sunrise, subtle pink reflecting off the mountain side, cool cloudless azure skies.” But the thread that securely binds together this hybrid of memoir and poetry is Rives’ “open-hearted, open-minded” capacity to connect—with history, place, and most of all, people, especially her readers. “There is no one left in my circle who lived through these moments with me, no one with whom to share. So I write,” writes Rives. And—lucky us!—we read. We connect. Thread widens the circle of the writer’s life to welcome and include anyone fortunate enough to become interwoven with this honest, lyrical book.

–Rachel M. Srubas, author of The Desert of Compassion, The Girl Got Up and other books.