BOOKS

Oscar, The Misanthropist

Oscar, The Misanthropist is a remarkable piece of work. Reading it is something akin to watching a movie. The writing style enables the reader to visualize Oscar, his actions and his surroundings, as well as the people with whom he interacts. Skillman’s imagination is astonishing, as is the detail in this portrait/narrative. Bravo!

—Lillo Way, author Lend Me Your Wings, www.lilloway.com

 

Haiku Sequel!


To Take Us All Home
by Jocelyn Skillman & Judith Skillman
ISBN 978-1-950276-24-0
Goldfish Press
50 pp, $10.00

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To Take Us All Home is a sparkling conversation, in the form of haiku verse, between two writers and artists who happen to be mother and daughter. This slim volume includes meditations on motherhood, spirituality, marriage, and the inevitable loss that is a part of the human condition. As an ongoing dialogue, the short epigrammatic segue created by the formal aspect of haiku suffuses the whole with poignancy. The authors’ first collection, In Our Resemblance, was also published by Goldfish Press.

A reader may expect good verse from the elder Skillman, a renowned poet, but may be surprised and delighted to discover that Skillman the Younger sparkles with equal brilliance, as in “Each dark twist and curve/ nature's branching through eons/ leads me home to you”.

--Lillo Way, author, Lend Me Your Wings

In their final section, “The Conversation”, Judith and Jocelyn Skillman invite us to listen in on an achingly tender heart to heart between mother and daughter. This collection of haikus is a tight, warm hug for anyone who knows the pain of seeing or being a child in a hospital bed, who has longed for a baby they may never meet, or who just really needs their mom. Let their words rock you back and forth through generations of motherly strife, devotion, and love.

--Sydney Parker, writer, The Atlantic, Seattle’s Child, & The Guardian

The tight haiku form here contains these imagistic moments of perception in a tender but never sentimental conversation between mother and daughter. Both artists, they discuss color and texture, marriage that endures through its storms, and the natural world, its creatures and tides. Throughout the sequence, their intimacy weaves the poems into a moving whole. “I would give you…a white yacht with/dingy”. The daughter answers: “I am lost at sea/but in my small boat I rest…” And we, their readers, are glad to follow them.

--Anne Pitkin, author, But Still, Music

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In Our Resemblance

A mother and daughter share their thoughts and concerns on today's events. This is a timely poetry book on inter-generational communication, love, and sharing in the divisive times we find ourselves. Perhaps only love and respect for each other can save us from the many disasters facing us today. Our very own survival hinges on it.

Haiku, by nature, is reticent; so too is mystery. These poems by Judith and Jocelyn Skillman, a dialogue between a mother and her daughter, are laconic and tender. In the pandemic much has languished, and the poets hardly avert their eyes. Yet, these are seedlings of good stock—as Merleau-Ponty would say, they are new “openings onto the world.”

--Marc Hudson, author, East of Sorrow (Red Mountain Books)

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A Landscaped Garden for the Addict

Skillman’s searing, lyrical poems drop us into a world of pain and chronic illness with daggerlike precision of observation. Here are (prescription)-drug visions: a “moon sprouted like an eye / in the back yard—sinister.” Here is a violin that “begins to belong to a case.” Here is age and aching— ”Before bed you become old”—redeemed by the poet’s skilled hand and sure eye that “saw desire rising in the hardy fuchsia, / its red bells and crimson half moons / . . . making morning seem like evening.” This is dense, visionary, dark poetics, a world we want to inhabit for its pricks of insight and flashes of dark beauty.
—Priscilla Long, author of Holy Magic

Immersed in metaphorical gardens, Skillman’s poems offer landscapes like Hansel and Gretel’s maleficent woods or Alice’s dislocating hole or backyards like our own. But it’s Gulliver’s lands that echo softly or loudly in poems that detail both threatening and active wounding. For readers, the rewards are a deepening of empathy, insight into spiritual and physical pain, and perhaps self-recognition.
—Ann Spiers, author of Rain Violent (Empty Bowl) and Back Cut (Black Heron)

ISBN 978-1-951651-95-4 • $19.95 USD
SHANTI ARTS PUBLISHING
WWW.SHANTIARTS.COM

Judith Skillman is the author of twenty collections of poetry and the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust. She has been a Writer in Residence at the Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington, and the Hedgebrook Foundation on Whidbey Island. Also a visual artist, Skillman paints expressionist works in oil on canvas. She is interested in feelings engendered by the natural world. —www.judithskillman.com

The Truth About Our American Births

The Truth about Our American Births explores experiences of exile and displacement common to third-generation German Jews. As a child, author Judith Skillman was shielded from the past her parents shared with their fellow immigrants to Canada. The Holocaust was rarely mentioned. While these poems explore themes of exile, emigration, nostalgia, and loss, they also examine the role of nature as an organic force for healing.

“With striking figurative language, deft concision, and deep-imagery, the speaker in this poet’s new collection grapples with the implications of estrangement from the culture, religion, and tribe of her Jewish parents. Is identity inherited? Is identity cultivated? Is the need for belonging universal? Skillman navigates the circuitous terrain of political, familial, and personal history with admirable quietude and tenderness.” 

Janée J. Baugher, author of The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, McFarland & Company

 “Can you emigrate without immigrating? What is a refuge for a refugee? Judith Skillman’s The Truth about Our American Births asks bold questions and makes vital distinctions about the stories of her German Jewish heritage—from first to second to ensuing generations. Her poems are like the panorama beyond the window as a train charges down its track, playing with time and memory, about what is told or assumed . . . The complex layers in her poems resound with surprising leaps and answers.”

Sharon Hashimoto, Award Winning Poet & Fiction Writer

Available through Ingram & your local bookstore, or order directly from

http://www.shantiarts.co/uploads/files/stu/SKILLMAN_TRUTH.html 

ISBN 978-1-951651-26-8
96 pages

A review by Erica Goss in Pedestal Magazine

An interview by Carol Smallwood

An interview about writing through trauma by Janee J. Baugher

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“There is something about these pieces that is chill without being icy or bitter, wise without being cynical, and as striking as slanted autumn light glimpsed through tree branches.”              Pedestal Magazine


”So it’s a good thing that we have Judith Skillman’s newest creation, Came Home to Winter. For those of us with kids approaching adulthood, it paints a vivid picture of what to expect when you’re done having expectations.” - Tina Kelley, Mom Egg Review

Premise of Light

Available from Small Press Distribution, Amazon.com, and at bookstores such as Open Books.

Kafka's Shadow

Additional Reviews of Kalka's Shadow:

I have been drawn to JudIth SkIllman’s work for three decades, ever since her first book, Worship of the Visible Spectrum. In her latest volume, she inhabits the mind of Franz Kafka, as well as some of those who loomed large in his life: family members, would-be sweethearts, his editors. we thus see the world in the outré, o -kilter way that Kafka seems to have—as if the lenses of his eyes worked differently than most people’s, letting in a light that few can focus. In Kafka’s Shadow, he sees edges that others don’t, edges that cut him o  from taking part in “normal” life—pleasing his father, marrying, performing work that others consider productive...
—Michael Spence, Umbilical, winner of the new Criterion Poetry Prize

Reading Skillman’s poems, I felt more acutely my own desire to be fully alive, the pressing realities of beauty and loss.
—John Amen, editor of The Pedestal Magazine

. . . readers will encounter the intelligence and honesty of the real thing.
—Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005

. . . Skillman’s ability to accommodate multiple meanings in even the most seemingly straightforward of sentences is like being pushed by a doppelganger who insists we jump beyond obvious interpretations.
—Christianne Balk, The Holding Hours, UW Poetry Series

Interview with Carol Smallwood here.

House of Burnt Offerings

Pleasure Boat Studio
A Literary Press
201 West 89th Street
New York, NY 10024

House of Burnt Offerings threads strands of desire, loss, grief, and hope through daily rituals and yearly ceremonies, transforming ordinary life into a sacrament.

In House of Burnt Offerings Judith Skillman makes everyday life the province of the tough questions she asks, and the lucid, restless, energetic and often stunning language that can surprise us with lines like “the sharp shears/of our smiling teeth.” Her imagery ranges from windfall apples to Kafka and everywhere between. In what this poet calls her “solitary watch” readers will encounter the intelligence and honesty of the real thing.--Brendan Galvin

ANGLES OF SEPARATION

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Angles of Separation explores the ways in which humans divide and isolate themselves from nature, one another, and their own spiritual centers, in poems rich with organic images, myths, and sensory details. This book, with its taut lyricism and uncompromising honesty, reveals the fragility of bonds and life itself. Angles of Separation is replete with a virtuosity which shines through the crafting and complexity of language; its subtle emotional heft will disturb and pull at the heart. This collection of finely wrought and linguistically elegant poems is sure to catch the reader up in a slow burn.

Praise for Angles of Separation:
Angles of Separation is a collection of little gifts from a writer at the height of her powers. Judith Skillman's trademarks are a sharpened wit coupled with dense and memorable imagery. She is a resource library of the natural world which she superimposes onto irreal narratives that order the inchoate and land somewhere between the realms of French post-impressionism and abstract expressionism. Skillman's unique brand of poetry is full of surprises.

--Jana Harris

Few poets seize the natural world in the tender, particular ways that poet Judith Skillman does… For a poet who sees this world as does Skillman, nature’s beauty and cruelty is ours as well.

                               --Chicago Sun-Times Book Review

 About the Author
The recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book “Storm” (Blue Begonia Press, 1998), Skillman’s poems have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, New Poets of the American West, and other journals and anthologies.  She has been a Writer in Residence at the Centrum Foundation & Hedgebrook. A Jack Straw Writer in 2008 and 2013, her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the UK Kit Award, and Best of the Web. Visit judithskillman.com

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Distributed widely through Ingram, Baker & Taylor
To order by mail: Send a check for $16 (postage included) to
Glass Lyre Press, P.O. Box 2693, Glenview, IL 60026

No detail is too quotidian to escape the dream catcher of this poet's imagination.  Drawing on sources as various as Native American lore, Eastern European folktales, classical literature, Shakespearean tragedy, pop culture icons, childhood fantasies and dreams, along with her own considerable powers of invention, Skillman presents us with a psychological landscape as diverse as contemporary American experience.

While the starting point of many of these poems is isolated (and isolating) personal experience—a breast biopsy, a mislaid set of keys--transformed into poetry, the personal here becomes collective. In one of my favorite of these poems--"Naugahyde"--the eponymous "Nauga" is imagined as a creature with "vinyl skin."  Richly evocative of our remembered past, the poem concludes: “Repetitions become rituals/to summon sleep: a black and white TV/an ironed woman smoking cigarettes/while running her vacuum/back and forth across a blinded house/on any given snowy afternoon.” This drive to mythologize personal experience becomes for poet Judith Skillman the all-embracing, energetic, ongoing, many-storied project of a lifetime.  -- Belle Randall, Poetry Editor of Common Knowledge

 About the Author

Skillman’s latest collection is “The Phoenix: New & Selected Poems 2007 – 2013, from Dream Horse Press. The recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book “Storm” (Blue Begonia Press, 1998); she has also received a King County Arts Commission (KCAC) Publication Prize, a KCAC Public Arts grant, and Washington State Arts Commission Writer’s Fellowship. Two of her books have been finalists for the Washington State Book Award. Skillman’s poems and collaborative translations have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, BEACONS, The Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and other journals and anthologies.  She has been a Writer in Residence at the Centrum Foundation  & Hedgebrook. Currently she teaches at Yellow Wood Academy, Mercer Island, Washington.  A Jack Straw Writer in 2008 and 2013, her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the UK Kit Award, and Best of the Web.

Available through Dream Horse Press, Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, Ingram
Visit Dream Horse Press
Contact the Editor

The goal of this book is to enable poets at all stages of development to move from their current stage or plateau to the next level in cultivating a unique voice and poetic music. This book encourages the student of poetry to entertain a kind of Zen consciousness, a “Beginner’s Mind”—for that is the only way to continue serenely in the business of writing poems. The work is cognizant of the fact that most often, if you ask a person why they write poetry, the answer will be “Because I have no choice.”

This text can be used by a poet on his or her own, or it can become a tool in the classroom. Broken Lines contains chapters on theory and practice. Whether one is a beginning writer, has been writing for years and published work in journal and/or book form, Broken Lines includes content to propel the writing life forward.

 

Other Skillman Books in Print

Available on Amazon.com
and many local bookstores

The White Cypress

Judith Skillman's new collection, The White Cypress, is a finely textured weave that astutely examines the "seven deadly sins" from varying points-of-view. Certainty is erased as the reader is immersed in a mercurial blend of myth and personal history. Though we learn that "stunting" can be caused by denial, there is also a "violence in pleasure and leisure" as subtext. Each cherub embodies a nymph, the exotic the familiar. Using crafty fluctuation, these poems dislocate the reader so that firm ground is not an option. Skillman's world is strangely fluid, yet layered with complexities that complement one moment and subtly contradict the next. The White Cypress asks us to ponder the residual problems of naming (our) "sins." -- Katherine Soniat, author of The Swing Girl

Judith Skillman's poems are finely hewn, well-balanced, and compelling. Whatever her subject matte -- ants, a lemon, September, a harbor, a plum tree -- her pieces unfurl, progress, and culminate seamlessly; narratives, portraiture, and commentaries infused with palpable images, lines destined for epigraphy. This is poetry worth reading and rereading. -- John Amen, Editor of The Pedestal Magazine

REVIEWS:

BOSTON AREA SMALL PRESS AND POETRY SCENE
Review by Barbara Bialick - In THE WHITE CYPRESS, Judith Skillman places imagery and symbolism in dissonant layers of nature, mythology, and personal history, to create penetrating parfaits. Each poem asks the reader to interpret it with care...

THE IOWA REVIEW
Review by: Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom - "In her thirteenth collection of poems, The White Cypress, Judith Skillman takes up again the tools of naturalistic observation and mythical allusion to examine difficult truths about the interior life of the self and its drives toward intimacy and seclusion, eroticism and entropy, as well as the paradox and complexity inherent in familial relationships. Skillman's tone is occasionally lofty but most often direct, incisive, unflinching."

THE PEDESTAL MAGAZINE
Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft - "While I can still hear Sappho's jewel-like fragments in the pages of The White Cypress, I am most interested in the ways in which these fragments have become softer and more abstract than those I found in The Never. I am even more interested by the autumnal quality of these poems, if you will pardon such a vague descriptor. There is something about these pieces that is chill without being icy or bitter, wise without being cynical, and as striking as slanted autumn light glimpsed through tree branches."

The Never

These poems sizzle with elemental directness and judgment, linguistically sharp and probing. Like the never which seems indistinguishable from the always, this book aims for truths which give us the comfort of no-comfort. That makes poems in this collection something to trust. -- David Weiss, Editor, Seneca Review

Few poets seize the natural world in the tender, particular ways that poet Judith Skillman does... For a poet who sees this world as does Skillman, nature's beauty and cruelty is ours as well. -- Chicago Sun-Times Book Review

Book Reviews of The Never:
Message in a Bottle Poetry Magazine - by Fiona Sinclair
"Skillman laces her work with mythological references that are never forced byt are naturally suggested within the context of the poem itself.  In 'The Last Pie Bird' the baking tool reminds the narrator of the "the bard of Orpheus", whilst in 'Bending to Work in the Heat' women toiling in a field are likened to "Adam and Eve"."

The Pedestal Magazine - by JoSelle Vanderhooft
"I do not know, of course, if Judith Skillman appreciates Sappho's poetry or if the work of the ancient West's most celebrated female poet has influenced her directly. I do know, however, that her elegantly sparse lines and her flare for the mysterious have much in common with the fragments history has left us."

Melusine Magazine - by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
"The poems in Judith Skillman's latest collection, The Never, are as stark in tone and rich in naturalistic imagery as the best of her recent work, while retaining the heft afforded by her knack for historical reference and mythological allusion. In this volume, there is a particular emphasis on the weight of history and the presence of nature and how they inform the present and the personal.."

Published by Dream Horse Press

Prisoner of the Swifts

The vivid imagistic precision of Judith Skillman's "Prisoner of the Swifts" encompasses the full emotive spectrum--"the quotient / of happiness / divided by storehouses of dread"-- in poems that traverse the range of experience from pleasure in newborn life to "the great wealth of pain" from which that life emerges. Like Dickinson, another poet whose passionate imagination "overflowed / the room" to embrace the whole universe, Skillman watches the aerial acrobatics of never-alighting swifts beyond her "Victorian walls," and discovers in them the strength of spirit to confront her own frailty and to celebrate a life "that seeds and recedes." These poems "render in iridescence" the mortal lives, with their windows onto eternity, of us all. - Carolyne Wright - Published by Ahadada Books

SPECIAL NOTICE: Prisoner of the Swifts was a finalist in the 2010 Washington State Center for the Book Award

 

Heat Lightning, New & Selected Poems 1986 - 2006

Includes selections from Judith's seven previously published books, plus a 'New Poems' section. Work from Heat Lightning has appeared in Poetry, FIELD, Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. - Published by Silverfish Review Press

Review of Heat Lightning in THE CORTLAND REVIEW
By David Rigsbee, in Issue 41, November 2008

 

Coppelia, Certain Digressions

"In Coppelia, Certain Digressions, Judith Skillman explores beyond the puppet's passivity, the careful appearance of the doll, to plumb the machinations and manipulations of womanhood in all its expectations and realities. Throughout these poems, she uses taut language and subliminal imagery to evoke the feminine role in its many forms...mother, daughter, sister, wife...and the relationships to children and spouses as well as, ultimately, the past and the sometimes painful, often mundane path of aging. Beyond simple beauty, in this collection Skillman has crafted a resonant reminder of survival." -- Joannie Kervran Stangeland - Published by David Robert Books, 2006

 

Latticework

This collection of poems, inspired by Judith Skillman's collaboration with textile artist Erika Carter, was selected by Contemporary Quilt Arts "Visual Verse Project" for a five year traveling display of quilts and poems. - Published by David Robert Books, 2004

Circe's Island

"Judith Skillman sings. She sings of home so as to define it. She sings home back to origins, both Hebrew and Hellenic, that give it warmth and meaning. Her precise, quick-stepping lyrics help us find out own way home, and to face the mystery of never fully knowing it." -- David Hamilton, Editor, The Iowa Review - Published by Silverfish Review Press, 2003

 

Storm

"The apparent normalcy of the world of these poems is a thin ice on which the speaker pauses, scarily, suspended over a turmoil of delusion, cruelty, and materialism, over our deepest personal and cultural terrors, over the tidal surge of history, remaining calms and deeply inquisitive, singing a little." -- John Witte, Editor, Northwest Review - Published by Blue Begonia Press, 1998

 

Red Town

"Language shuffles the ground between inner and outer landscapes, yielding poems that hover in a dreamlike present and in the nearness of another, yet more revelatory vision to come."
- Charlene Breedlove, Editor - Journal of the American Medical Association - Published by Silverfish Review Press, 2001

 

Sweetbrier

In Sweetbrier, the elegy is given new treatment. Aspects of physics and nature come together to prefigure loss and define its role as essential to transformation. The world of poems in this book is populated by summer landscapes that include crabapple, hawthorn, hyacinth, honeysuckle, and cottonwood.
Published by Blue Begonia Press, Working Signs Series, 2001

 

Beethoven and the Birds

"This fine collection translates the music of chaos into the music of unwavering attention. Filled with historical insight and personal illumination, Beethoven and the Birds is an elegant, complex achievement." -- Linda Bierds - Published by Blue Begonia Press, 1996
 

Worship of the Visible Spectrum

"...Worship of the Visible Spectrum attaches itself to the mind's eye, leaves afterimages that enlarge the reader's world and living in it memorable." - Madeline DeFrees - Published by Breitenbush Books, 1988