Author Kara Thompson traverses a continent of meanings and implications, focusing on various artworks that use some type of blanket motif, or actual blankets, to illustrate metaphorical blankets, especially ones that deal with death. It addresses one ostensibly ordinary object - a blanket - but quickly turns your ideas on their heads. From one paragraph to the next, I discover something more of myself, hidden or maybe even protected, both grieving and comforted, tightly threaded within all these blankets.' - Layli Long Soldier, author of Whereas (2017), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, There is nothing trivial about this little book. And in the spaces between those connections, there is a magic I have, until now, only known to exist in poetry. This book draws unexpected connections and links from one subject to the next.

What is not often considered, but like a blanket, felt with 'a kind of muscle memory the trace of habitation.' What is rarely accounted for in language, signifiers and terms, such as the 'affect, kinship, ceremony, inheritance, story' that imbue anything with real meaning. It is not the what, so much as the what is not : What is not seen, but within the folds.

Kara Thompson has stirred a deep desire in me to understand. Simply exquisite in all its folds.' - Kathryn Bond Stockton, Distinguished Professor of English, University of Utah, USA, and author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009) 'Kara Thompson's Blanket is an elegant, nearly seamless weaving through Native politics and histories, American violence, personal loss and remembrance, psychoanalysis and healing, geology, artworks and literature-varied stitches and detail toward the greater themes and design of comfort, protection, trauma, loss, and the disparate turnings of human living. Kara Thompson continues through her 'unfoldings' to educate and surprise readers with new threads to follow and contemplate long after the small, but densely woven Blanket ends.' - New York Journal of Books 'Liquid brilliance blankets this book, making its forays endlessly moving-and often surprising. Thompson weaves together in her Blanket dichotomous ideas about blankets-art versus utility, hard shells versus soft wraps, infection versus protection-to illuminate the ways in which these may all be different sides of the same thing. 'The gift of these volumes is how they tease out the unexpected associations and implications of their subjects, and Kara Thompson's Blanket is no exception.

Blanket by Kara Thompson