Anna Jacobson

Anna Jacobson mixes up the fiercely serious with the whimsical in her second book of poems, exploring a daily life of navigating small rituals and routines along with anxiety, a crippling companion.Anxious in a Sweet Store is Anna Jacobson's second illustrated poetry collection where the 'sweet', whimsical, humorous, and quirky is juxtaposed with the 'anxious' and disabling forces of mental illness. Themes of food, family, dreams, and culture crystallise, while the poet's mind is fizz bang sherbet on the tongue. Anxious in a Sweet Store is an inventive collection of poems that build and enrich each other across threads of music and anxiety and beyond.

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. Includes B&W internal illustrations by the author.