Fold & Unfold: Poems by Nancy Jakobsson

How do you unfold a day? A dream? A relationship drawing to a close? Something broken? Nancy Jakobsson's poems in Fold & Unfold offer instructions, not guidelines but guiding lines to absorb and be inspired by. We fold letters into envelopes and fold sheets we place on linen closet shelves. We unfold letters that arrive and blankets for warmth. When we open a trunk of special memories, we unfold and refold them, remembering, and sometimes polish the silver. We close the trunk. and we live our life.

Lifting each piece gently, remembering,
I unfold the past.

surprised by what lasts,
the stubbornness of things both soft and hard,

"Her poem "Sometimes It Takes the Dreamer a Long Time to Notice," captures a dream in which tiny butterflies with white-fringed wingtips move in patterns inside a white sphere with a hole the dreamer can see into this tiny world.
Like the dream, the poems in this collection offer "a wonder of aliveness."
-Veronica Patterson

"Nancy writes about place so eloquently-place in the geographic sense and the place of each of us in the scheme of it all. Her years as a grief counselor are reflected in the strong compassion that flows from lovely works."
-Roger Clark