Ravelings: Essays on Love, Loss, and Wonder

In Ravelings, Lisa Knopp takes up an older, opposing meaning of the verb ＂ravel＂--＂to entangle＂--as she explores the deaths and departures of loved ones and the rituals by which we mourn and honor them, while contemplating her relationships with writing, spirituality, sense of home, aging, desire, and the relationship between body and mind. Entangled in these losses and changes, Knopp experiences wonder, joy, connectivity, and wholeness.

In these nimble and companionable essays, Knopp considers hunger and fullness through ethical, disordered, and mindful eating; awakens to common magic through two chance encounters with a magician; and finds humility and empowerment as an unpartnered sixty-year-old woman in a ballroom dance class filled with young couples. Knopp comprehends her experiences with nuance, revealing time and again that the same ravel of text can encompass the blending in a single moment of the exotic and mundane, of fullness and want, of love and abhorrence, of desire and contentment, of freedom and bondage, of severance and connection, and of the creative act as both an evocation and an imposition.

Lisa Knopp is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She is the author of several books, including From Your Friend, Carey Dean: Letters from Nebraska’s Death Row; Interior Places (Nebraska, 2008); and The Nature of Home: A Lexicon and Essays (Nebraska, 2002).