Melissa Kwasny is the author of Putting on the Dog, six collections of poems and Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision; and is the editor of the anthologies Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800–1950 and, with M. L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Kwasny's work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Boston Review and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. She lives in the Elkhorn Mountains outside of Jefferson City, Montana.
Cloth making—reeling, spinning, weaving, knitting—is historically “night work,” most often done by women, most often poor women, then and now, all over the earth.