The Argument of Time - Paperback

by Jenny Isaacs (Author)

The Argument of Time takes its title from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, in which Time is boldly and experimentally personified as the play's chorus/narrator, subverting the Aristotelian classic unities of time, place, and action. These poems, written over the course of twenty years, take up and investigate "what to her adheres," examining experience in the probing light of memory and drawing on physics, linguistics, and biology to illuminate the mysteries of consciousness, desire and loss.

Simultaneously precocious and a late bloomer, the author of this collection earned an undergraduate poetry degree at age 19 from Johns Hopkins University, and is bringing out her first chapbook in retirement.

"From the Arctic Circle to Malaysia, from Paris to the moon," poet Ethel Rackin notes on the volume, "Isaacs' poems capture our longing and loss" and deliver "such subtle wisdom." Poet J.C. Todd adds: "Jenny Isaacs peels back the cultural veneer of love and loss, of presence and absence to reveal the mutability of longing: the yearning to be subsumed, the yearning to be separate from. Infused with the fresh vision and invention of quick-silver shifts of perspective and time, the language of the poems draws on concepts of physics to create 'a new and common tongue' through which desire is made palpable as density, mass, atmosphere, friction, weight."