These poems are real. True searching is going on here, but if you don't take matters of the spirit and the heart seriously, or if you don't trust poetry to poke its fingers into the nettles and moist dark underbelly of truth, if you see poems as bit-players in larger insulated hothouse-flower tugs of war between this or that academically blood-drained 'school' or 'movement' then this book is not for you. If on the other hand you count yourself among the ranks of those still willing to be moved by the honest and carefully crafted language of a terrific poet, go find this damned book. Read especially 'Sonnets to my Daughters, 20 Years Into the Future' and see if you don't feel a noticeable shift in your chest, your heart being subtly changed.
...

i had the awesome oppurtunity to have him as a professor. he is truly amazing. he i sone of the greats who is bringing poetry back to popular culture.

A lean and honest book. Skinner's concluding sonnet sequence ranks with any contemporary poet's for sheer quiet power.

The Franconia, New Hampshire, farm of the American poet Robert Frost was turned into a museum and center for poetry and the arts in 1976. From that time, "The Frost Place" has been annual event wherein an emerging poet has been invited to spend the summer living in the house where Frost once lived and wrote some of his greatest poetry. The Breath Of Parted Lips: Voices From The Robert Frost Place, Volume One is a remarkable anthology of twenty-four poets, each of whom won that honor of a summer's residency and document the success of the original concept as a means of generating outstanding poetry while nurturing the poet's muse in the rooms and views that were once the inspiration of the great Robert Frost. Poem At 40: Windwashed--as if standing next to the highway,/a truck long as the century sweeping by,/all things at last bent in the same direction./An opening, as if all/the clothes my ancestors ever wore/dry on lines in my body:/wind-whipped, parallel with the ground,/some sleeves sharing a single clothespin/so that they seem to clasp hands,/seem to hold on.//And now that I can see/up the old women's dresses,/there's nothing but a filtered light./And now that their men's smoky breath/has traversed the earth,/it has nothing to do with them./And now that awkward, fat tears of rain/slap the window screen,/now that I'm naked too,/cupping my genitals, tracing with a pencil/the blue vein between my collar bone and breast,/I'll go to sleep when I'm told.

Jeffrey Skinner's "Gender Studies" simultaneously shows affection for and asks "what is this [bad]?" of our era. After the fine volumes that precede it, including the National Poetry Series selection "The Guide to Forgetting", Skinner's poetry has even more life under its belt. This poet writes the way Collins wishes he could: sophisticated without being repugnant, earthy without being clumsy, and nostalgic but never making one think of anything but a real life. Too bad he's not in D.C. sitting in a tub of butter. The middle section, comprised of jazzy sonnets in the persona of Bill Evans, the pianist, show every register of diction, hip to intellectual, while being a musical feat. All the poems astonish by a kind of elegant, deadpan ambush, and many are hilarious, as in "Ashbery", a poem which puts the eponymous hero, kidnapped, under a blanket with a flashlight in the trunk, unstoppably writing poems. The book's best moments come when one understands the juxtaposition of several collaged scenes, as in "Jocelyn" "The School of Continuing Education" and the title poem, "Gender Studies". He's a buff poet. Never cagey. When I forget exactly how to write a poem, I turn to work like this, and to this work.

This book brings the poet's eye and ear to the misery and redemption that is alcoholism. These are good poems, first, well written, and wonderful to read in their diversity and power. That they confront a topic which frightens so many people is remarkable. That they bring to the topic fresh, sometimes startling points of view is a cause for celebration. "Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance" will interest recovering individuals, their friends and families, addiction treatment professionals, and anyone, in recovery or not, who loves good writing and is willing to be open to an honest look at America's favorite disease

This book was pretty okay, for a book about creative writing. I mean, it was cheesy and simplistic, but what book about creative writing isn't? It won't make you into F. Scott Fitzgerald overnight, but it might help. We used it as a textbook for a creative writing class, and it was a good class, so it did its job.