Sober Ghost

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.

About the Author :
Jeffrey Skinner was awarded a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. Skinner's Guggenheim project involved a conflation of contemporary physics, poetry, and theology, and he served as the June, 2015 Artist in Residence at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2015 he was awarded one of eight American Academy of Arts & Letters Awards, for exceptional accomplishment in writing. His writing has also been awarded grants and fellowships from such sources as the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. His most recent prose book, The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets, was published to wide attention and acclaim, including a full page review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. He has edited two anthologies, Last Call: Poems of Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance; and Passing the Word: Poets and Their Mentors. Skinner's poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, FENCE, and The Paris Review.With his wife Sarah Gorham, Skinner co-founded Sarabande Books, which won the inaugural AWP Small Press Publisher Award, and the Golden Colophon Award from CLMP. He is Professor Emeritus at The University of Louisville.

Review :
"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\ On Jeffrey Skinner's previous work: 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