Jeffrey Skinner – författare

Jeffrey Skinner's poems come at the world from many different directions. Some are outrageous and very funny, like “Experiment,” which begins, “I sewed my father into a specially designed, handmade bear suit. He was indistinguishable from a real bear, and yet retained the necessary functions of a human. I also provided a G.P.S. radio collar. Then I air-dropped him into a densely forested preserve. When I returned a year later I found he had mated with an Asian black bear. He and she and their two cubs lived a quiet life in a mountain cave.” In other poems, Skinner explores more familiar domestic landscapes, taking us with great tenderness and precision into the life of the human heart. By turns poignant, brainy, and hilarious, Salt Water Amnesia is a book that will surprise and delight.

Reading the Bay

A calm water morning. After what was said on both sides. Don't you talk to me that way. My daughter. We cannot speak, now, nor stand to touch.

The bay, covered with tiny script Moving rapidly right to left. Words Crossing over One another, whole passages Torn from an asylum diary. I lifted her

Body, a huge flailing penknife, into the car.

A seagull sits bobbing on the text. My brother. It appears that, today at least, all language moves out to sea.

Jeffrey Skinner has published four collections of poetry: Late Stars, A Guide to Forgetting, The Company of Heaven, and Gender Studies. His work has received wide recognition, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. Currently director of the creative writing program at the University of Louisville, he is also co-founder and editorial consultant for Sarabande Books.

A private eye turned moderately successful poet leads readers on a satiric, hopeful tour of how to make a life in the arts, while still having a life. Revealing, hilarious, and peppered with sly takes on the ins and outs of contemporary American poetry (chapters include "The Silence of the Iambs," "The Revisionarium, Ask Dr. Frankenpoem," and "The Periodic Table of Poetic Elements"), Jeffrey Skinner offers advice, candor, and wit.

Revision is the process a poem endures to become its best self.Or, if you are the poet, you are the process a poem endures to become its best self.Endures because a first draft, like all other objects in the universe, has inertia and would prefer to stay where it is. The poet must not collaborate.Best self because the poem is more like a person than a thing, and does not strenuously object to personification.Yo, poem.But let''s not get carried away. It''s your poem and you can treat it as you wish; sweet talk it; push it around if that''s what it takes. Alfred Hitchcock notoriously said of the actors in his movies, "They are cattle."

Jeffrey Skinner is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Salt Water Amnesia (Ausable Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, and The Paris Review, and his work has earned awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation.