Salt Water Amnesia

By Jeffrey Skinner

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 193133725X
• ISBN13: 9781931337250
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Ausable Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A superb collection of poems

I've read and enjoyed other works by Jeff Skinner, but this is his best yet. These poems are fresh, clear, funny and sad. I highly recommend this book to all poetry lovers -- and even to folks who don't often read poetry.

poems touching the heart of common experience

In the same six-line stanza of "Widow's Walk," Skinner can write, "If the heart could think, it would stop...," and "Sleep, the book that reads us." You think you could write these lines, they are so simple and direct. Yet of course you can't. You're not a poet with Skinner's unique gift of plain language artfully used to articulate the common life. This is not revelation, but rather memory. Skinner continually brings to mind--brings back to mind--moments everyone has experienced physically or in thought, but has not had the time or made the effort to reflect much on. Thus, there is in these poems a sense of familiarity; which is one thing that leads one to wrongly believe one could write the same words Skinner does. Skinner leads one to familiarity with aspects of one's life, often aspects one has missed, sometimes neglected. Skinner is a seasoned, widely-published poet whose work has appeared in Poetry, Yale Review, Slate, Paris Review, and elsewhere.