A Stitched Life

   

A STITCHED LIFE

by Christine Saari

Christine Saari’s A Stitched Life is more than just memoir or a collection of poems. It is a psalmody to endurance, resilience, family, and love (in all its permutations). Pick this book up, and you will feel it singing in your hands before you read a single word. From an Elk King (“An apparition. A vision from a dream.”) to the loss of a beloved friend (“Even in death, you radiated beauty.”), Saari’s poems are postcards from a mother/grandmother/wife/lover/friend/artist—each one meticulously beautiful and beautifully meticulous, embroidered with Madonnas, flowers, landscapes. Drape A Stitched Life around your shoulders and join Saari by the kitchen stove. Listen to her words and rejoice.

Martin Achatz, author of A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders

In A Stitched Life, a memoir and meditation on family and history, Christine Saari offers a compelling narrative, starting with her life as a child on her family’s farm in Austria. Thanks to two centuries of letters the author has inherited, the poems unroll against an historical backdrop, including events spanning from the collapse of the Austrian monarchy in 1918, to the creation of the European Union in 1951, to more recent times. Saari describes, for example, how Russians burned her grandmother’s home when they occupied Silesia after World War II and Polish guards confiscated her belongings, forcing her to wander through a postwar wasteland. We learn how the cousin of the author’s father had to kill people he loved, that he himself died in the war and that her mother did not believe in the Fuhrer. Saari is haunted by the death of her father in the war, of her mother a minute before she arrived, and of her unborn brother, whom she imagines as a little, loved companion in one of the poems. The author also reflects upon her loving marriage to Jon Saari in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, their back-and-forth treks from their Michigan home to the farm in Austria, which Jon embraces as his own. A keen observer of the natural world, Saari marvels when discovering that the blue gentian of Wildcat Canyon is the blue gentian of her home in Austria. The book offers so much more, impossible to cover in a short blurb. These moving and beautifully written poems engage the reader. Their power to amaze continues long after the reading.

U.P. Poet Laureate Beverly Matherne, author of Love Potions, Teas, Incantations

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