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 conscious- ness that defines how we relate to each other, and therefore how we see ourselves. As the poem argues:

About Jacobson and his poetry, the unmatched political poet Thomas McGrath wrote: "Dale Jacobson was the most brilliant student I have ever had in a poetry workshop." In the eighties he characterized Jacobson as "the best of the young American poets." Since then Jacobson has written a half dozen long poems, one of which, A Walk by the River, has been praised by Robert Bly and W.S. Merwin, and called a masterwork by poets Floyce Alexander, Robert Hedin, and Larry Woiwode, who as Poet Laureate of North Dakota also designated Jacobson an Honorary Poet Laureate. He has published ten books of poetry and is acknowledged by McGrath's publisher as one of the foremost scholars on McGrath's work. Dale Jacobson lives in the Red River Valley north of Alvarado, Minnesota.