Josephine Jacobsen – författare

The recipient of nearly every major literary award in the United States, Josephine Jacobsen has enjoyed a career that spans more than six decades, from the publication of her first poem at age eleven to her 1995 nomination as a National Book Award finalist. What Goes without Saying brings together thirty of her previously published stories. In "Sound of Shadows," she takes readers through the double-bolted front door of a rowhouse, into the narrow quarters of Mrs. Bart, an elderly widow who has folded her life into her dark living room where the sole light in her "one room wide" world comes from the magenta- and green-tinged colors flashing on her television screen. We follow the muezzin's melancholy call in "A Walk with Raschid," an O. Henry Prize story about an intriguing ten-year-old Arab boy who guides a honeymoon couple through the Moroccan Fez. And the tautly written "Protection" begins with an exacting poetic image that is typical of Jacobsen's insightful prose: "Mica sparkles. The banshee ambulance is beating its mad bell. Like a reaped grassblade on a meadow of macadam, its object lies."

Collected poetry from the 1995 National Book Award finalist.

Of the handful of American poets who have made a contribution to the fields of fiction and literary criticism, Josephine Jacobsen has been one of the most widely acclaimed for the force and originality of her work. In The Chinese Insomniacs, a wholly new collection of her poetry, she reaches her highest level of intensity in poems about people, the landscape of dreams, and the nature of time. She shows us the common bonds of human beings from century to century with an empathetic intelligence that is rare in American letters today.