Threads
Jill Magi
“Inflection implicates us in family language we hardly understand, in old country we are also responsible for destroying and recreating in a new world and word order whose mapping remains the task at hand. These threads work between the telling of a story and history to inhabit such burdens of belated homecoming that stay the legacy of conquest.”
—Ammiel Alcalay
“In this delicate drawn/sewn/written book,
we are asked to ‘feel a map as a ghost limb,’
to reach down to a place of ‘generative tension’
where ‘prayer has atrophied
as the grammar-muscle of together.’
Beautiful, poignant, her stuttering speech
‘on the other side of perhaps.’”
—Cecilia Vicuña
“Some things can’t be understood without turning to poetry, the genre that allows observation, love, memory, confusion, and explanation to intermix and play. Threads stitches all these things together. It tells a complicated story of a father who is an Estonian refugee and of a daughter who attempts to understand what this means by moving through genres and mediums. It is a moving story of searching for meaning and of an eventual arrival at a place of many meanings.”
—Juliana Spahr
“Constituent parts of a person are discerned when memory, history and familial inquiry regroup to form and appreciate identity .... These probings take the work into regions of cultural conflict and reconnection, emotional shifts and aesthetic conveyances to arrive at nuanced perspectives that bridge former gaps and voids. The syntax that delves there is sincere and soft as well as gritty in its interpersonal realism.”
—Brenda Iijima
About the Author
Jill Magi is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the chapbook Cadastral Map, published in 2005 by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, as well as several self-published and personally distributed small, handmade books. Her poetry, prose, and visual work has been published in HOW2, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket, The New Review of Literature, Aufgabe, Chain, and Pierogi Press, and exhibited at the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery and the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. A 2006-07 writer-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, she also teaches at The City College Center for Worker Education and runs Sona Books, a small press dedicated to publishing risky, quiet, project-driven works in chapbook form.
“Inflection implicates us in family language we hardly understand, in old country we are also responsible for destroying and recreating in a new world and word order whose mapping remains the task at hand. These threads work between the telling of a story and history to inhabit such burdens of belated homecoming that stay the legacy of conquest.”
—Ammiel Alcalay
“In this delicate drawn/sewn/written book,
we are asked to ‘feel a map as a ghost limb,’
to reach down to a place of ‘generative tension’
where ‘prayer has atrophied
as the grammar-muscle of together.’
Beautiful, poignant, her stuttering speech
‘on the other side of perhaps.’”
—Cecilia Vicuña
“Some things can’t be understood without turning to poetry, the genre that allows observation, love, memory, confusion, and explanation to intermix and play. Threads stitches all these things together. It tells a complicated story of a father who is an Estonian refugee and of a daughter who attempts to understand what this means by moving through genres and mediums. It is a moving story of searching for meaning and of an eventual arrival at a place of many meanings.”
—Juliana Spahr
“Constituent parts of a person are discerned when memory, history and familial inquiry regroup to form and appreciate identity .... These probings take the work into regions of cultural conflict and reconnection, emotional shifts and aesthetic conveyances to arrive at nuanced perspectives that bridge former gaps and voids. The syntax that delves there is sincere and soft as well as gritty in its interpersonal realism.”
—Brenda Iijima
About the Author
Jill Magi is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the chapbook Cadastral Map, published in 2005 by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, as well as several self-published and personally distributed small, handmade books. Her poetry, prose, and visual work has been published in HOW2, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket, The New Review of Literature, Aufgabe, Chain, and Pierogi Press, and exhibited at the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery and the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. A 2006-07 writer-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, she also teaches at The City College Center for Worker Education and runs Sona Books, a small press dedicated to publishing risky, quiet, project-driven works in chapbook form.
