In the Photic Zone by Joanne Jacobson

In the Photic Zone is a beautiful book of perilous covered things: the naked razor a  grandmother inexplicably carries in her purse, the disease of the blood invisible until it erupts, the unvoiced grief of a father bursting with anger. Descending toward unlit depths, chipping at upper strata, Jacobson is both diver and geologist; in quest of the secrets people take to their graves, she is finally compelled to concede that “Not all concretions contain specimens!”; dreaming she might “empty the world of its secrets,” she gracefully concedes failure. From human limitation and mortality, Jacobson, with the lyricism of a Merwin, the syntactic elegance of Virginia Woolf, and the fervor of her parents’ gardening, cultivates beauty. And we are altered as we read her work: made more human, acutely conscious of our evanescent life on earth, and of the love that can hold off, and finally accompany, death, like a shining stone in a dark place. This book is such a stone. 

 —Natania Rosenfeld, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Wild Domestic, and The Blue Bed 

Every single word in this collection illuminates something bright and new about the world. Every story creates constellations. For what hides in our blood, or in the earth, or in our childhoods, or in our deepest relationships, Jacobson finds the language. How can writing be so lyrical and precise at once? This is the work of a master. 

—David Sugarman, Redactions 

In the Photic Zone, Joanne Jacobson’s brilliant new collection, plumbs what we can and cannot easily see into, through, or past. Each of these beautiful, lyric essays explores the disquieting midpoints of the human and natural worlds: the churned up, fossil-filled soil of an abandoned mine; an MRI machine scanning a brain slice by slice; the gardens of cathedrals and internment camps; the bewildering silence in the family car as the drunk father speeds through intersections. In precise, evocative prose, Jacobson sets us squarely down in the center of mystery, insisting that we pay attention to it. It is a breathtaking and perilous space. It will dazzle you. 

 –Ann Hudson, Subtraction Isn’t Always Less