Baker Artist Portfolios

Simultaneously precocious and a late bloomer, at age 19 Jenny Isaacs earned a degree in writing poetry from Johns Hopkins University; over 40 years later, her first chapbook collection is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press. In the interim decades she married the very first person she had spoken to on campus and raised three daughters with him. She wrote and published sporadically while founding and directing several nonprofits, including a Montessori school and a county-wide immigrant rights group providing legal services to undocumented community members threatened with detention and deportation. Now mercifully retired from immigration work, she lives with her husband near her parents on the shores of a small creek off the Chesapeake Bay.

Her poems have appeared in print in Painted Bride Quarterly, Mad Poets' Review, US 1 Worksheets, Friends Journal, and the Delaware Valley Poets anthology Thatchworks, and she was the first runner-up in Bucks County Poet Laureate Competition four times. Her return to writing & submitting poetry in 2025 yielded publication in Pedestal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, Mezzo Cammin, Bulb Culture Collective, Willows Wept Review, Pulsebeat, Neologism Poetry Journal, the Loch Raven Review, and Hyperbolic Review. Her forthcoming chapbook, The Argument of Time, was a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press' 2025 Open Chapbook Competition.

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 "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.

"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 to us such subtle wisdom ...." Poet J.C. Todd calls The Argument of Time "a memorable debut" and 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."