Josephine Jacobsen's distinguished career as poet and writer spans more than six decades, from the publication of her first poem at age eleven to her 1994 American Academy of the Arts Citation, which celebrated her as a recipient of "almost every major poetry award." From 1971 to 1973 she served two terms as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a post recently retitled National Poet Laureate. Now in paperback, In the Crevice of Time brings together 176 new and previously published poems by one of the most accomplished and most widely acclaimed poets of our time.
 Praise for Josephine Jacobsen and her work:
"Josephine Jacobsen's poetry... demonstrates not only scrupulous verbal craft but a kind of auditory seriousness, a preference for depth and precision over mere charm or beauty." -- New York Times
"Josephine Jacobsen's mind is exquisite and urbane, which is not to say that it has confined itself to salon conversation or academic discourse... Formal and fastidious, Jacobsen meditates on death -- oh, not because she herself is aging, nothing even faintly vulgar like that -- because of her apprehension of our fleshly frailty." -- Washington Post
"Wry, meticulous, compassionate, she casts her diaphanous net over the widest range of subjects, from the dailiness of breakfast with the morning paper ('I spill coffee on a head of state') to the distant apocalypse when the cockroach ('he will be blind/not sterile') inherits the earth." -- San Francisco Review of Books
"Healthful and pure, protein and green salad for the mind." -- Parnassus: Poetry in Review
"Josephine Jacobsen writes masterfully, consistently, and better every year. She has a superb narrative gift and she sketches the people of her world with originality, inventiveness, and rare intelligence." -- Nation
"Josephine Jacobsen's quietly articulated observations have the dark resonance of great art. Her spare diction combines the passionate commitment of Louise Bogan with the precision and compactness of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. Her best work, done in her seventies and eighties, has won her almost every major poetry award." -- American Academy of Arts Citation, 1994

In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Jacobsen, Ms. Josephine

United States

The Johns Hopkins University Press

"Josephine Jacobsen gives us a startling word-by-word gift. Her characters -- human and animal -- know edginess and exhilaration. She is unfoolable. Her judgment is lyric, wise, and daring. She looks all around, her angle of vision invariably original, able to switch from the periscopic to the circumferential."--The 1995 National Book Awards 
The recipient of nearly every major literary award in the United States, Josephine Jacobsen has enjoyed a career that spans more than six decades, from the publication of her first poem at age eleven to her 1995 nomination as a National Book Award finalist. What Goes without Saying brings together thirty of her previously published stories. In "Sound of Shadows," she takes readers through the double-bolted front door of a rowhouse, into the narrow quarters of Mrs. Bart, an elderly widow who has folded her life into her dark living room where the sole light in her "one room wide" world comes from the magenta- and green-tinged colors flashing on her television screen. We follow the muezzin's melancholy call in "A Walk with Raschid," an O. Henry Prize story about an intriguing ten-year-old Arab boy who guides a honeymoon couple through the Moroccan Fez. And the tautly written "Protection" begins with an exacting poetic image that is typical of Jacobsen's insightful prose: "Mica sparkles. The banshee ambulance is beating its mad bell. Like a reaped grassblade on a meadow of macadam, its object lies." 
Praise for Josephine Jacobsen: 
"Unlike the predominant shrillness, vagueness, or opacity of the contemporary scene, Josephine Jacobsen's work is marked by its reserve, stoic timbre, and its high precision."--Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky 
"Josephine Jacobsen writes masterfully, consistently, and better every year. She has a superb narrative gift and she sketches the people of her world with originality, inventiveness, and rare intelligence."--Nation

What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jacobsen, Ms. Josephine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jacobsen, Ms. Josephine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jacobsen, Ms. Josephine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)