| A hybrid work of poetry, prose, and visual art published by Futurepoem in 2007. Order from Small Press Distribution, Amazon.com, or your local bookstore. From Ron Silliman's contemporary poetry blog: Jill Magi has published a fair number of poems over the past decade or so, but none of the ones I’d read before prepared me for the power of this text. It’s spare without being minimal, moving without being in the slightest bit mawkish. [. . . ] Magi herself calls it a book of “prose, poetry and collage” & I find myself thinking of it as a project, a category from conceptual art. Individual pages are reproduced, functioning halfway between illustration & text. Some pages are torn, so that we read the text flowing into that of the surviving page beneath. [. . . ] there is a seriousness of purpose, a quietness in the act of description [. . .]. And the book has so many sides, so many faces. I made a decision early on in writing this note that I couldn’t really quote one or two passages here – there are so many different kinds that any selection would essentially distort the whole. (May 2007) From Publisher's Weekly: Magi deftly weaves together translations of poetry, travelogue and cultural reconstruction. The book is saturated with the quest for lost memory; a cellphone in contemporary Estonia seems anachronistic, and reproduced pages of documentation about her relatives' activities against Communist rule, leading to the Singing Revolution, make for fascinating reading in themselves (when in English). This is a confident, careful and unpretentious first volume. (May 2007) Read the interview with Jill Magi about Threads Read excerpts published in The Brooklyn Rail View the online exhibit "An Old Book Became Threads" View the online exhibit "Destroying Threads" Read the review in HOW2: Innovative Writing by Women Read the review in CutBank Poetry Read the review in Galatea Resurrects Read the review in Tarpaulin Sky |   |
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 "As the great poet Keorapetse Kgositsile put it, 'When the clouds clear / We shall know the colour of the sky.' When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets--no matter the medium--who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling." -from Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley |