Böcker av Jeffrey Skinner

With Sober Ghost Jeffrey Skinner presents the reader with a kind of eschatology of the past, as well as of the future. He writes of visitations by the "ghosts" of a life's worth of people loved and lost, including father and mother, as well as previous selves. One of those ghostly selves is addicted to drugs and alcohol, and even though "present" Skinner has been clean for nearly half his years, the alcoholic self is a stubborn one, ever ready with an itemized list of the catastrophic errors and choices of the past. Nevertheless, the book retains Skinner's usual humor, as well as his unique, shaded species of hope. The poems leave the reader with a redemptive glow, in which the vastness of our ignorance is balanced against our joy in creation, and our joy in each other.

Winner of the 2016 FIELD Poetry Prize Chance Divine explores the broadest territory possible, from the origins of the universe to the speculative, precarious future. Bookended by the dazzling prose poem sequences called "Genesis" and "Revelation," Jeffrey Skinner's new collection is equally grounded in the contemporary science of photons, black holes, and climate change and the uncanny mythology of celestial talk shows, shifting identities, angels, and politicians. Visionary, wildly unpredictable, and often unsettlingly funny, this is a book that matters.