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The Argument of Time by Jenny Isaacs

Name: The Argument of Time by Jenny Isaacs
SKU: 180808
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Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

In The Argument of Time, 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. A memorable debut!

–J. C. Todd, author of Beyond Repair

There are two kinds of poetry: the one is filled with images like air and water, the other with the properties of air and water. The poetry of Jenny Isaacs is illustrative of the latter. The poems in The Argument of Time demand deep probing, not just deep thought, but felt thought. “Movement is always difficult,” she warns, and movement is precisely what she offers in these poems: “Here is the evolution of fish:/ they teach themselves to speak by listening.” So, dear reader, move into these poems and be moved. Listen to their speech. Feel their thought, and you will end by “finding the way/ we were meant to come.”

–George Drew, author of More Distant than Olympus

Jenny Isaacs‘ The Argument of Time traverses space and time, offering us the perspective and breathing room we so desperately need. From the Arctic Circle to Malaysia, from Paris to the moon, Isaacs’ poems capture our longing and loss: “this human physics, / these wakings and stretchings / our mornings.” And they deliver to us such subtle wisdom, as in these final couplets, also from “The Bending Moment”: “Every beginning’s a bridge: not on the way there / but there, built to stay / against the bending moment.” You’ll want to keep this gem of a book by your side.

–Ethel Rackin, author of In Time

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The Argument of Time

by Jenny Isaacs

Paper

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This title will be released on June 26, 2026

In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale 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 “the argument of Time,” examining experience in the probing light of memory and drawing on physics, linguistics, and biology to illuminate the mysteries of consciousness, desire and loss.

#poetry #time #memory #consciousness #phenomenology

Jenny Isaacs graduated at a precociously young age from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in writing poetry, then wrote “around the edges” of her life for 40 years while raising three daughters to adulthood. Now retired, she lives with her husband four doors down from her own parents, on the shores of a creek near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The Argument of Time, her first collection, was awarded publication as a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’ Open Chapbook competition.