Weaver’s Knot by Glenda Bailey-Mershon

(1 customer review)

$22.99

 

“‘Everything’s a song, I say,’ writes Glenda Bailey-Mershon, and this collection is indeed full of song—poems that skat and pulse and pluck and stir, poems that sing with the ancestors and cartwheel out to the stars. Bailey-Mershon dedicates Weaver’s Knot in part to ‘the women in my family who tied knots so fine they’ve held for generations.’ The knots she ties in this beautiful collection are equally fine, equally lasting—fibers of language wrapped in golden light.”

–Gayle Brandeis, Author of Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus (A Testimony), The Selfless Bliss of the Body, and Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write

 

This collection approaches poetic perfection. Bailey-Mershon celebrates her rich and diverse ancestral history with poems that resonate with narrative, lyric, and imagistic brilliance. There is mourning, too, for all that has been lost: ancestors, a beloved son, language, tradition, a harsh but simpler time. Bailey-Mershon documents working class life with a focus on women’s experiences: the joy, the drudgery, the complex relationships to kin and community. The ancestral poems connect to a fascinating, science-informed section that explores new, mind-bending theories of the universe. The string theory of physics is the perfect metaphor for the weavers’ threads that tie this book together. This collection is one of this year’s must-read books.

–Ellen LaFleche, author of Walking Into Lightning, a collection of grief poems about her husband’s death from ALS.

 

This journey of a mill town girl coming into herself may be just the book you need to read right now.

–Camille T. Dungy, Author of Trophic Cascade and the finalist for the National Book Award, Guidebook to Relative Strangers

 

You’ll want to read this collection of poems twice—once for the stories, and again for the language, and perhaps even once again to let Bailey-Mershon’s imagery rain down on you like her beloved stars. With each turn of phrase, Bailey-Mershon channels her Roma and Native American ancestors as surely as she breathes – their fierce connection to nature, their devotion to family. Her ability to, within a single stanza, transcend time and connect the then to the now is magical and breathtaking. Bailey-Mershon writes with the passion of youth, the wisdom of maturity, and the confidence of a woman with something important to say. Let’s hope she has much more to tell us.

–Tricia Booker, author of The Place of Peace and Crickets: how adoption, heartache and love built a family, University of North Florida writing faculty

 

“I have a hard time fathoming that this is Glenda Bailey-Mershon’s first full-length book of poetry, because she has influenced my writing so immensely during the last decade with her prolific prose. Poetry flows throughout her debut novel Eve’s Garden, and finally her clever word play is spotlighted in this captivating collection of verse.”

–Chris Bodor, Editor-In-Chief of A.C. Papa Literary Journal

 

“Walk with this poet of amazing skill through lushly-described landscapes to visit generations of compelling Roma and Cherokee people you will not soon forget.”

–Darlyn Finch Kuhn, author of Red Wax Rose, Three Houses, and Sewing Holes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Description

Weaver’s Knot

by Glenda Bailey-Mershon

Full-length, Paper

$22.99

979-8-88838-282-0

2023

Weaver’s Knot immerses readers in the lives of textile mill workers, weavers, and needleworkers of Appalachia, and intrigues with the colorful tapestry of ethnic groups who mingle there. We are introduced to a traditional folksinger with a voice “granite rich and husky,” and a Romani poet who beguiles a bored coffeehouse audience with Manouche jazz. “Everything’s a song,” she says. “Mountain girls” skat, dance to rain drumming on city roofs, and sass strangers who try to seduce with cock-eyed complements. Here mountains settle around one’s shoulders like a familiar shawl, sacred streams flow with prayers, and grandmothers four generations removed sing echoing lullabies. Here also one finds love for humanity––”cunningly organized particles”—and devotion to the mountain “landscapes dipped in honey.”

Glenda Bailey-Mershon grew up at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, among a textile-mill working and farming family with diverse roots. She lived for years in Chicago and Florida, and now has a home again in the Carolinas. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including most recently Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology (Butcher’s Dog, UK). She is also the author of Eve’s Garden, a novel about three generations of Romani women (Twisted Road). Her previous poetry publications include the chapbooks sa-co-ni-ge/blue smoke: Poems from the Southern Appalachians (Jane’s Stories); and Bird Talk (Wild Dove). She also edited four anthologies by women writers under the auspices of Jane’s Stories Press Foundation, which she co-founded.

 

1 review for Weaver’s Knot by Glenda Bailey-Mershon

  1. Kirkus Reviews –

    WEAVER’S KNOT
    POEMS
    BY GLENDA BAILEY-MERSHON ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

    A nostalgic set of works that’s steeped in family history.

    Bailey-Mershon presents a collection of poems about life in the Appalachian South.

    The author waxes poetic about family and mountain living in this book. The speaker in “A Flatlander’s Mind Rests on Peaks,” for instance, refers to herself as a “writer born of blue lines, sheltered / since birth by sapphire mounds” who exiles herself to write, “Indigo ink spilling across a page.” She also recalls ancestors from a “land of butterflies and mists.” Another poem memorializes Viney Parker, a mountain-dweller with 16 children who founded a congregation. “The Hills’ Embrace” has the speaker tell of hiking in the mountains at different points in her life, feeling “Ghosts / swirl in the ebb of air–– wispy arms, / kisses soft as breath.” In “An Incantation for my Grandmothers,” the titular women must let go of their daughters, “feathers / tossed by angry winds, falling / lightly half a continent away”; in the title poem, though, the author acknowledges that “escape is not as simple / as saying good-bye.” “Back When I Was Juicy” recounts an early love affair with reading, while “Fertile Fields” deliciously describes the relief from a much-needed rainstorm. The few poems that turn attention away from the mountain landscape feel less profound. However, Bailey-Mershon’s details throughout the collection are tactile and often awe-inspiring, as when describing a grandmother’s “stiff hands / spinning, yarn spilling from pointed fingers” and a single mother with a “granite rich and husky” voice. Overcome with emotion while exploring Blue Spring Creek, another speaker feels “Words jam like logs in my throat.” The earth comes alive in a description of a mountain trail lined with “maples with the bark peeled back” and “mud-glazed pebbles” beside an “ancient spring,” and in another work, winter “arrives whistling like / a surprise we have coming.” The expansiveness of Appalachia and the wonder of family are also made clear: “Surely it’s / enough, on a cold winter eve, watching your own baby / sleep in a moon-blanketed room.”

    A nostalgic set of works that’s steeped in family history.
    Pub Date: N/A
    ISBN: N/A
    Page Count: –
    Publisher: N/A
    Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
    Review Program: KIRKUS INDIE
    Categories:
    LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
    SHARE YOUR OPINION OF THIS BOOK
    https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/glenda-bailey-mershon/weavers-knot-poems/

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