Angi Holden’s assured debut, Spools of Thread was the winner of the inaugural Mother’s Milk Books Pamphlet Prize. Relationships, love, parenting, and being parented, are all explored in the pamphlet; the poems image-rich, sensitive, and filled with love. Spools of Thread is an exquisite body of work by a much-loved poet - it is as rich and colourful as spools of thread themselves.
Publication date: 27th February 2018
From the pamphlet:
I Measure My Mother’s Love
In spools of thread:
royal blue Sylko and scarlet Gütermann.
In sixpenny cards of buttons:
pink and blue for handknit cardis
plain white for cuffed school shirts,
turquoise florins for my sister’s coat.
In bolts of cloth tied with string:
polished cotton for summer frocks.
Brushed Viyella for winter nightgowns,
grey twill for press-pleated skirts.
In rustless needles and blood-sharp pins,
in running stitches tacking shapeless fabric
to lithesome bodies and coltish limbs.
In smocking and twice-sewn French seams,
in the electric hum of the black and gold Singer,
in turned hems, let down as we grew.
ANGI HOLDEN
