Mary Elder Jacobsen is a writer, illustrator, and editor and the author of the poetry collection Stonechat. Born in Washington, DC, she grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, and lives in Calais, Vermont, where she works as a freelance editor, an assistant to the curators of Art at the Kent, and coordinator of an annual reading series of Vermont authors held in a still-unplugged 1823 meetinghouse. A recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency and other honors, Jacobsen earned her BA in Art with Honors and holds graduate degrees from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she was a Teaching Fellow, and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. A recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency, Her poems have appeared online, on the air, and in publications such as Cold Mountain Review, Four Way Review, Green Mountains Review, The Greensboro Review, numerous anthologies, and Poetry Daily.

Other poems on the web by Mary Elder Jacobsen:
"Slice of Morning"
"Wiping Dust From The Atlas of Human Anatomy in The Used Bookshop"
"Dragonfly"
"This Be the Oyster"

Mary Elder Jacobsen's Website.

About Stonechat:

"Stonechat is a remarkable book, fluent, fluid, formal, and fresh. Deeply connected to family and a New England landscape she knows intimately, Mary Elder Jacobsen carefully shapes each poem to its subject, the poems soaring with an easy, unforced lyricism…these beautiful poems confirm the singularity of Jacobsen's experience."
—Elizabeth Spires

"Jacobsen's strong, clear poems make an accidental almanac for loving the passage of days…she deploys a variety of poetic forms with playful excellence—a crown of sonnets, ghazal, villanelle, ekphrastic—anyone could wander into this work and find a resonant sentiment. The collection as a whole encompasses, investigates, and celebrates Ceres' vicinity—as Jacobsen both invokes the goddess of grain and the harvest by including a pasture's worth of plants in her poems... Across the volume, the poet's sustained gaze at motherhood, daughterhood, a cherished husband and son, as well as a deep understanding of home allows readers ‘the rare particulars' of Jacobsen's ‘intimate brilliance.'"
—Julia Shipley

"In poem after poem, Mary Elder Jacobsen delights her reader with a vision, upended: the newborn's bath becomes the dying father's; the bees we keep, keep us…Like water finding its basin (of course Jacobsen lives on a lake!), the poems form, as ode, villanelle, sonnet—each holding but not containing the perfect punctuated surface that reflects the world she breathes."
—Jody Gladding

"In poem after poem in Stonechat, Mary Elder Jacobsen maintains an Edenic wonder at the natural world with a verbal music that flows with internal rhymes, alliteration, and cascading lyrical lines. Charged with unslaked enthusiasm for her subjects, the poet sustains riveting attention to her immense particulars that add up to a poetic sum that is greater than the whole of her subjects, and conceits by virtue of their verbal magic in which they continue to ‘sing' anew each time they're read or heard."
—Chard deNiord

"I have been a fan of Mary Elder Jacobsen's incisive and precise poems for many years now. From the opening sequence of Stonechat, it's evident that her debut collection is a culmination of countless hours of devotion to craft and love for the actual world."
—James Crews