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Small Knots
A book of poems
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
First published June 30, 2004
1 person is currently reading
48 people want to read
About the author
Kelli Russell Agodon
17 books180 followersKelli Russell Agodon is a prize-winning poet, writer, and editor from the Northwest.
Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest book is Dialogues with Rising Tides from Copper Canyon Press. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press as well as the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Retreat for Women. Her last book, Hourglass Museum, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize. She is the author of Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press, 2010), Winner of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Prize in Poetry, and a Finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She is also the author of Small Knots (2004) and the chapbook, Geography (2003). She co-edited the first eBook anthology of contemporary women’s poetry, Fire On Her Tongue, and recently published The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, a book of poetry writing exercises she coauthored with Martha Silano.
She’s received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, James Hearst Poetry Prize, Artist Trust, and the Puffin Foundation. Agodon lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State on traditional land of the Chimacum, Coast Salish, S'Klallam, and Suquamish people where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. She serves on the poetry faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
She writes about living and writing creatively on her blog, Book of Kells at: www.ofkells.blogspot.com
Visit her at www.agodon.com or on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/agodon
Twitter: @kelliagodon
Instagram: @kelliagodon
Or write to her directly at: kelli (at) agodon.com
For more information on Kelli, please visit: www.agodon.com
Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest book is Dialogues with Rising Tides from Copper Canyon Press. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press as well as the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Retreat for Women. Her last book, Hourglass Museum, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize. She is the author of Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press, 2010), Winner of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Prize in Poetry, and a Finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She is also the author of Small Knots (2004) and the chapbook, Geography (2003). She co-edited the first eBook anthology of contemporary women’s poetry, Fire On Her Tongue, and recently published The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, a book of poetry writing exercises she coauthored with Martha Silano.
She’s received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, James Hearst Poetry Prize, Artist Trust, and the Puffin Foundation. Agodon lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State on traditional land of the Chimacum, Coast Salish, S'Klallam, and Suquamish people where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. She serves on the poetry faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
She writes about living and writing creatively on her blog, Book of Kells at: www.ofkells.blogspot.com
Visit her at www.agodon.com or on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/agodon
Twitter: @kelliagodon
Instagram: @kelliagodon
Or write to her directly at: kelli (at) agodon.com
For more information on Kelli, please visit: www.agodon.com
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 1, 2024
Small Knots by Kelli Russell Agodon, is a great collection. The first section Tangle introduces themes of rosary beads, "prayers disguised as pronouns," "island sweaters patterned to indentify sons and husbands drowned," war: "here war is only newsprint./How easy not to forget about it." and death: "It is always the same person dying/and re-dying in someone else's life." I like how she plays with pronouns, saying you but then saying that you means I.
Section two, Interweave, brings in poems that reference Pablo Neruda and travel. Section three, Stitch, brings in cancer and St. Peregrine, the saint of cancer. In this last section she gets to the heart. It's a good read, in a well fit together book, filled with thought provoking poems.
Section two, Interweave, brings in poems that reference Pablo Neruda and travel. Section three, Stitch, brings in cancer and St. Peregrine, the saint of cancer. In this last section she gets to the heart. It's a good read, in a well fit together book, filled with thought provoking poems.
November 28, 2011
Small Knots (Cherry Grove, 2004) is Kelli Russell Agodon’s debut poetry collection. Agodon’s writing is tight throughout, and perfectly reflects the tension between death, fear and an abiding sense of faith. She draws in the reader with a deceptively conversational style, all the while seamlessly knitting metaphors into images conversely terrible and humorous. Every poem is stitched into a magnificent tapestry of the life of one woman, vividly recorded. Its detail and intricacies conjure the speaker’s female ancestors. She embodies their fear, loss, faith and strength. Small Knots is not about death, but a woman’s attempt to come to terms with her history and life. The book is an every-woman’s story of existence only partly removed from her female ancestors’ fate of servility and erasure.
Small Knots is divided into three sections: Tangle, Interweave and Stitch. Tangle opens with “The History of – ,“ listing the speaker’s ancestral women, their life details lost in a fog of misogyny and modesty. This poem sets the tone as a personal quest of self- and genealogical discovery. The first line declares:
There is not enough in the past.
And later in the poem:
Do not write “breast” in the Bible, Gail. And when I explain
it was the type of cancer Aunt Mattie died from: No.
At the poem’s close, she sharply highlights the speaker’s familial ambiguity with her description of a house, its white stairs leading upward and off the edge to nowhere.
A water theme, primarily oceanic, dominates much of Tangle, as metaphors of death and dread the dead inhabit and the living are drawn to. The speaker equates her pregnancy in “New Hips” to a type of near-death experience, yet one ultimately defining and affirming her life. Her hips:
curve with the universe
with that faint line on the edge of oceans.
Later in the same poem:
These new hips open doors to whitecaps.
The experience of pregnancy moves the speaker towards an understanding of death. By the end of Tangle, she has hammered an uneasy truce with it in “The Bones She Keeps” and “Herbs for the Dead.” In “Bones,” she admits:
the living always make room
in the spaces the dead leave behind.
In “Herbs,” she masterfully describes an infant’s grave as having:
. . . foxglove reaching towards the sky
a dozen white rattles.
Interweave is lighter in tone than Tangle, based in part on the hard-won peace earned in the first section. Again, the segment’s first line sets the stage for Agodon’s sense of immediacy and urgency, evident throughout the book. In “After Hearing a Woman Say the Heart is the Same Size as an Apple,” the speaker muses:
I begin to consider which one I keep in my chest.
However, underlying the section is a continued sense of dread and insecurities laid out in poems “Spiacente from Rome,” “Day of the Dead” and “Piñata Metaphor.” As Louise Gluck would say, the speaker “keep(s) up appearances,” evidenced in the section’s final poems “Trying to Decide Where to Retire” and “Seaside,” extremely moving and honest pieces, a fact that strengthens the poignancy and desperation the speaker faces in Stitch.
Stitch opens with “Routine Check-up,” addressing the possibility of the speaker facing cancer. Imagery throughout Tangle (fog, fingers, water) reemerges to unsettle her. Rain and fog swirl like ghosts around her as she returns after the initial diagnosis:
Rain shapes fog into patterns:
my mother’s pearl rosary, a simple stitch
of my wedding gown uncoiling
The more relaxed tone of Interweave is turned completely on its head. The speaker explores the possibilities of her own death. Apples of Interweave transform into tumors of Stitch. In “What I Told the Ceiling,” the speaker confesses the growth is:
an apple waiting to be picked,
maybe still green, if we can find it now.
And later in the same poem:
I want to pluck the fruit
from my body. Return the apple
to the tree . . .
The speaker recalls trips to Europe throughout Stitch, essentially returning to her ancestry. She applies a fig poultice to her lump, a treatment many of her foremothers may have prescribed. At the end she cannot describe her mastectomy scars to her mother. The speaker has worked to extricate herself from what Bergen Evans called “The Monstrous Regimen of Women.” However, her last confession in “Geography” perfectly summarizes her entrapment:
I wanted to say I am lovely.
Instead,
rivers flowed down the new terrain.
The book’s close leaves us uncertain of the speaker’s future. She is a survivor, though her scarring poses new and disturbing issues addressing her self-worth. She begins where she started; effects of breast cancer are unable to be voiced. But of Agodon’s talent and skill, rendering such depth and sensitivity into the complexities of one woman’s life and struggle for affirmation, there is neither doubt nor question.
Small Knots is divided into three sections: Tangle, Interweave and Stitch. Tangle opens with “The History of – ,“ listing the speaker’s ancestral women, their life details lost in a fog of misogyny and modesty. This poem sets the tone as a personal quest of self- and genealogical discovery. The first line declares:
There is not enough in the past.
And later in the poem:
Do not write “breast” in the Bible, Gail. And when I explain
it was the type of cancer Aunt Mattie died from: No.
At the poem’s close, she sharply highlights the speaker’s familial ambiguity with her description of a house, its white stairs leading upward and off the edge to nowhere.
A water theme, primarily oceanic, dominates much of Tangle, as metaphors of death and dread the dead inhabit and the living are drawn to. The speaker equates her pregnancy in “New Hips” to a type of near-death experience, yet one ultimately defining and affirming her life. Her hips:
curve with the universe
with that faint line on the edge of oceans.
Later in the same poem:
These new hips open doors to whitecaps.
The experience of pregnancy moves the speaker towards an understanding of death. By the end of Tangle, she has hammered an uneasy truce with it in “The Bones She Keeps” and “Herbs for the Dead.” In “Bones,” she admits:
the living always make room
in the spaces the dead leave behind.
In “Herbs,” she masterfully describes an infant’s grave as having:
. . . foxglove reaching towards the sky
a dozen white rattles.
Interweave is lighter in tone than Tangle, based in part on the hard-won peace earned in the first section. Again, the segment’s first line sets the stage for Agodon’s sense of immediacy and urgency, evident throughout the book. In “After Hearing a Woman Say the Heart is the Same Size as an Apple,” the speaker muses:
I begin to consider which one I keep in my chest.
However, underlying the section is a continued sense of dread and insecurities laid out in poems “Spiacente from Rome,” “Day of the Dead” and “Piñata Metaphor.” As Louise Gluck would say, the speaker “keep(s) up appearances,” evidenced in the section’s final poems “Trying to Decide Where to Retire” and “Seaside,” extremely moving and honest pieces, a fact that strengthens the poignancy and desperation the speaker faces in Stitch.
Stitch opens with “Routine Check-up,” addressing the possibility of the speaker facing cancer. Imagery throughout Tangle (fog, fingers, water) reemerges to unsettle her. Rain and fog swirl like ghosts around her as she returns after the initial diagnosis:
Rain shapes fog into patterns:
my mother’s pearl rosary, a simple stitch
of my wedding gown uncoiling
The more relaxed tone of Interweave is turned completely on its head. The speaker explores the possibilities of her own death. Apples of Interweave transform into tumors of Stitch. In “What I Told the Ceiling,” the speaker confesses the growth is:
an apple waiting to be picked,
maybe still green, if we can find it now.
And later in the same poem:
I want to pluck the fruit
from my body. Return the apple
to the tree . . .
The speaker recalls trips to Europe throughout Stitch, essentially returning to her ancestry. She applies a fig poultice to her lump, a treatment many of her foremothers may have prescribed. At the end she cannot describe her mastectomy scars to her mother. The speaker has worked to extricate herself from what Bergen Evans called “The Monstrous Regimen of Women.” However, her last confession in “Geography” perfectly summarizes her entrapment:
I wanted to say I am lovely.
Instead,
rivers flowed down the new terrain.
The book’s close leaves us uncertain of the speaker’s future. She is a survivor, though her scarring poses new and disturbing issues addressing her self-worth. She begins where she started; effects of breast cancer are unable to be voiced. But of Agodon’s talent and skill, rendering such depth and sensitivity into the complexities of one woman’s life and struggle for affirmation, there is neither doubt nor question.
August 7, 2011
If I understand correctly, this is Agodon's first full-length book. Although I've given it three starts, there are some poems here that I like very much, particularly in "Stitch," the last of the book's three sections. Will I read more of Agodon? Yes. As I said, this is a first book, and there is enough grounding in ordinary object, enough light shining through them in her lines, to draw me back.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews