Amnesia Findings

Overview

Now I knit myself back into a human. It's hard work relearning the steps—slip-stitch, drop-stitch, pick-up stitch, loop. I get into a rhythm. The pattern is complex—I drop a few stitches. The holes form gaps in my memory. Knitting visions and memories, Anna Jacobson's collection traces the skeins of lost histories and the spaces of dropped stitches. Exquisite and whimsical, these poems bear witness to the broken and healed. Gentle but robust, these are poems of personal resilience, framed by explorations of Jewish culture and family and fuelled by a boundless and exhilarating imaginativeness.

Reviews

"'A fascinating, thoroughly engaging exploration of culture and spirituality, belief and rationality, this book's poems are at once lucid and mysterious, profound and immediate. They evoke the esoteric language of their sources in Jewish lore, whilst being unmistakably modern and contemporary. They signal the development of an exciting new voice in Australian poetry.' Judges' comments, Thomas Shapcott Prize 'Amnesia Findings is an intricately executed portrait of mental pain, and familial and domestic solace. Jacobson's poems howl and sing, at once heartbreaking and also soothing with the beauty of their virtuoso linguistic performances. What a remarkable collection.'" —Lee Kofman

Author Biography

Anna Jacobson is a Brisbane poet and artist. In 2018 she won the Queensland Premier's Young Publishers and Writers Award. She holds a Master of Philosophy in poetry from Queensland University of Technology, a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Creative and Professional Writing) and a Bachelor of Photography with Honours from Griffith University. Her poetry has been published in literary journals, including Cordite, Rabbit, Meanjin, ABR's States of Poetry Queensland and Verity La, and her chapbook, The Last Postman (Vagabond Press, 2018), is part of deciBels series 3. Amnesia Findings is Anna's first full-length poetry collection.