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Dale Jacobson
THE BOOKS
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"A Walk by the River is filled with metaphysical musings, inquiries into mortality, and memory, but this Dante does not descend into the under-world for answers; he stays under the stars, on the banks of a discernibly Midwestern river, trusting his own imagination to carry him on, endlessly."
-- Joyce Sutphen, Poet Laureate of Minnesota
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"I've come to conclude that Dale Jacobson's A Walk by the River is a masterwork."
--Larry Woiwode, Poet Laureate of North Dakota
"Dale Jacobson is a poet of lyric praise and political vision. If there is a politics in his poetry as there is in McGrath's, it is as spiritually suffused with nature as William Blake's, as imagistic and allusively argued as Neruda's, and as American as a coyote on a hilltop outside town waking us up with his lyrical, plaintive song."
--John Balaban
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"Throughout Metamorphoses of the Sleeping Beast, Dale Jacobson speaks for the unspoken, the victimized, the disillusioned, and does so eloquently, forcefully, in a voice filled with beauty and moral indignation."
--Robert Hedin
Jacobson's long poem sweeps a broad range of inquiry into our relationship to the universe, to time, to our history and especially each other. It is, also, a political inquiry that reaches beyond the limitations of witness, resistance, or protest, all of which approaches, while useful and important, tend to respond primarily to the most heinous events as if they occur separate from our more civilized norms. By definition a witness stands apart. This poem instead puts politics at the very core of who we are. We find that politics is a fundamental determinant of our consciousness that defines how we relate to each other, and therefore how we see ourselves.
Factories and Cities is a poem about America in conflict- between the democratic and communal promise that ignited its original spirit and the dark psychological and economic realities that have come to burden it. It explores the hungers and unfulfilled needs of the past for freedom that haunt a nation propelled into a moment of world power to become a focus of humanity's historical struggles.
Link to: For a Drink of Water, a novel. A story about a Viet Nam War veteran suffering from PTSD who finds himself on a spiritual odyssey.
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https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1128116
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