The Patron Saints of Knitting by Nancy Keating

Nancy Keating’s The Patron Saints of Knitting is a sequence of lively meditations that infuse reverence, prayer, worship and gratitude with “funky originality,” high-quality craftsmanship, and verbal élan. Like votive tablets made not of terracotta but of brightly-colored yarn, Keating’s poems supplicate the old familiars of faith: forgiveness, understanding, trust, connection, persistence, through the experience of knitting–of making something new and making amends at the same time. If it is possible to channel love into “a happy accessory” Keating does so, knowing all the while, in the words of Shakespeare: “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”

–Star Black