Joyce Meyers’ Twisted Threads is a poetic exploration of self, nature and cosmos. She starts with childhood, family, and her husband’s untimely death. As she finds solace in nature’s profusion, it becomes a source of wonder that has an almost religious intensity. Moving from personal history to ecosystem to cosmos, she inhabits the vastness and flux, finding a mix of beauty, wonder, fragility and human folly in a world imbued with “everything that hovers out of sight.” The cosmos becomes a canvas on which to stretch our senses, with “science merely a mechanism for revealing more mystery.” These poems raise big questions in lively ways with a sensitivity and imagination that keep reminding us to look up, to notice. They will reward.
—Bill Van Buskirk, Author of A Poet’s Guide to Steady Employment

Twisted Threads is a finely wrought book consisting of four sections of trim, elegant poetry. Each is explored with the discerning eye and deft language of a poet who breathes life into her works. Meyers twines imagery and metaphor to stunning effect: a translucent crab parallels a girl’s desire for invisibility; mirrors, portraits and home movies provide windows into an uneasy childhood. Meyers depicts the loss of a beloved husband poignantly but without sentimentality—“Are you anything but ash? . . . Absent from my dreams, so present to my waking.” The poet shows us the degradation of both human behavior and our environment, alternating between tenderness and irony. Throughout, Meyers grapples with an unfathomably vast and astonishing universe and humanity’s place in it, as she offers thanks “for a mind / that can imagine cherry blossoms / on a frigid February day.” Such wide-ranging creativity rewards the attention of any reader who loves language—how it can shake us awake and make us gasp with awe and joy.
—David P. Kozinski, Author of I Hear It the Way I Want It to Be