Salt Water Amnesia

by Jeffrey Skinner

Book Overview

Fifth book by the co-founder of Sarabande Books and Skinner's most intimate work to date.

• 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.