Extreme of Things is a large collection combining new poems with a thematic selection from recent books. It explores the duality of existence, a track that runs through all Jenny Joseph's work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose.

This new book continues her attempt to present 'how things work' at the core, at the edge. It begins with poems from her last two collections, Ghosts and other company (1995) and All the Things I See (2000), which lead to the body of new and previously uncollected poems in the second part. The 'Season Songs' from Persephone (1986), her long out-of-print fictional work, are here reprinted as a bridge or interlude between the two main parts.

"Jenny Joseph writes poems full of mist and reason, poems strange in what they say but plain in the way they say it, poems rooted in an English tradition of passionate but quiet exactnessÖ careful craftsmanship, an honest exploration of the human heart, and statement after statement that nags at the memory."
Robert Nye, The Times

"She can delineate surfaces like a sculptor ñ exact, precise, sharply definite ñ yet with a startling undertow, a pull of unease which lies just beneath the texture, as an artery beneath the skin."
Joan Foreman, Eastern Daily Press

"Rational, realist, philosophical, Jenny Joseph represents a stoical refusal to see life other than it is ñ a less sentimental poetry it would be hard to imagine."
British Book News