GemmaMedia Books (2009)
As steadily and quietly as her marriage falls apart, so Kyoko Mori’s understanding of knitting deepens. From the flawed school mittens made in her native Japan, where needlework is used as a way to prepare women for marriage and silence, to the beautiful unmatched patterns of cardigans, hats, and shawls made in the American Midwest, Mori draws the connection between knitting and the new life she tried to establish in the United States.
From the suicide of her mother to the last empty days of her marriage, Mori finds a way to begin again on her own terms. Interspersed with fact and history about knitting throughout, the narrative touchingly contemplates the nature of love, loss, and what holds a marriage together.
In the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me and Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, Kyoko Mori examines a particular subject to understand human nature—when to unravel, when to begin again, when to drop the stitch, and when to declare. . . it’s finished.
– Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist
and What Is Left the Daughter
– Henri Cole, Lenore Marshal Poetry Prize author of
Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf
– David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: a Manifesto
and How Literature Saved My Life.