Books

Praise & Reviews

"Glaciology offers up a song that is honest, reflective and deeply moving."
—The Rumpus

“Few contemporary poets capture the severe lonelinesses of American manhood with such clarity and cold, honest wit as Jeffrey Skinner. ‘I have been hired by divine gangsters—’ he says, ‘Reason my work is invisible.’ I have admired his taut, strange work in book after book. He’s a pilgrim.”
—Tony Hoagland

“Wry and sad, friendly and serious, Skinner’s new work lets the poet and his readers see through, see around, and see past the real losses of adult life. The responsibilities of fatherhood, the force of artistic vocation, the prospect of global climate change, the unique properties of ice, and the burden of mourning all find a way through his sometimes laconic, always clear prose-poem blocks and well-honed free verse lines.”
—Stephanie Burt, author of Belmont and Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

“In Glaciology, Skinner’s perceptions often seem to balance on the very edge of unbeing. What is broken beckons to us, alive in the lens of his attention, constantly undone and remade in shifting, dazzling patterns. Funny, surprising, verbally sharp, and ruefully aware of danger at every turn, these poems shine with a fierce love of the world.”
—Cynthia Huntington, author of Heavenly Bodies

“This book is half elegy, the good kind, the kind that burns as it goes down and echoes after, the kind you wish you stole and read in secret in your teens before you knew you’d die. The flip side is celebration of world, of form, of fire, of family, of memory, and of self—and its continual redefinition for which we should be thankful. Glaciology is one fine way to remind yourself that you’re alive.”
—Ander Monson, author of The Available World and Vanishing Point

“Battilions of the ravenous,” our other possible selves—discarded selves, the penumbra of lived and unlived lives that Pessoa-like surrounds and attacks as well as sings in our brains—find voice in Jeffery Skinner’s beautiful new book.  “This life, enough for me” one poem ends, but the whole book denies it.  In each person’s skin, Skinner implies, live many imagined importunate identities from “The Prophet” to the man who finds that he has agreed to marry David Letterman.  Good as the opening of the book is, by the time of “Theories & Inventions” we know that we are in the hands of a master.
—Frank Bidart

Jeffrey Skinner’s new book—his best yet—is powered by a deep bittersweet nostalgia, a wry skeptical intelligence, and a canny sense of humor—all of which he uses to take aim at what is fleeting and tenuous, what is lost and passing away.  Gender Studies is a literary accomplishment, a humane achievement.
—Edward Hirsch

The uniqueness of Jeffrey Skinner’s poems is that they are the products of a consciousness which refuses to be guiltless—or unseasoned by doubt.  Accountability is at work here.  Forgetting is not allowed until the more painful, unsweetened remembering takes place.  The poet reminds us that before the preponderance of evil “good is the only surprise.”  These poems, by their example, aspire for us all to that good which is spiritual vitality—in these times a necessity.
—Tess Gallagher

Jeffrey Skinner has a metaphysical thirst so large and fierce and energetic that it can only slake itself in the ocean of language. And that is what it does in these amazing poems, which are amazing both for their complexity and sophistication and their buoyant clarity and immediacy.
—Vijay Seshadri

In Sober Ghost Jeffrey Skinner writes with a lyric brutality that stuns. This is a collection of poems that vary widely and wonderfully in form and timbre, and end up aptly defining our own dichotomies.  The raw finesse of many of Skinner’s lines inspired a shiver down my spine.  But he himself is unafraid.  While embracing rage and faith at once, Skinner has left behind the life imagined, and arrived at life as it is.  As a result, something miraculous takes place: despite life’s struggles, this Sober Ghost (a title that to me says everything) rises.  And what we see clearly, through that spirit, is Skinner’s prevailing gratitude for life itself.
—Alice Sebold