Jeffrey Skinner | Blue Book

Blue Book. Poems by Jeffrey Skinner. Number 26 in our Keystone Series.

Publication:  September 21, 2023 [100 copies]
23 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-06-8
$12.00

[ cover image by Ron Mohring ]

Jeffrey Skinner is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. His most recent book of poems, Chance Divine, won the Field Prize. In 2015 Skinner was given an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award. He has published seven previous collections of poems, and edited two anthologies, Last Call: Poems of Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance; and Passing the Word: Poets and Their Mentors. He also writes plays, and his full length play DOWN RANGE has had successful limited runs in New York City, Chicago, and Harrisburg PA. He is co-founder of Sarabande Books, and lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Is there life after death?

This breath we take—mine and yours, our next, the next after that—
it’s already been taken. Trillions of times. The air itself invented recycling.  

But to answer the question simply: yes. This current life, this now we
occupy, this one stop-motion-frame-hedge against the avalanche of death:
it is life after death. There’s death up ahead, ambling (or sprinting) toward
us, and there’s the pressure of death backed up behind, ready to burst
through a porous membrane, increasingly worn. And look, there we are in
the middle! Setting the table for a party, fun little conical hats at each
place, horns and whistles. Eating cake. Smeared frosting.

But you’re referring to something else, I think—personal death, the
one with our name embroidered on the label. So intimate it approaches
the erotic. You can believe what you want about death in general, but
the particular remains obscure, impossible. “The subconscious cannot
believe in its own death,” Freud said.

The Zen master who slipped away quietly, smiling, and the master who
went out tearing the bedsheets, screaming in fear: both were enlightened.  
The good thief’s conversion, his glittering miraculous slide from cross
to paradise. Even Houdini, who told his wife as he was dying, if there is
a way back, I will find it. His wife, waiting.

  • Order Blue Book here. Please note that each copy is made by hand.
  • Thank you for supporting our poets!
  • We welcome chapbook reviews! Please contact us for a review copy.