Jeffrey Skinner has published three collections of poetry, Late Stars (Weslyan University Press, 1985), A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, 1988) and The Company of Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Georgia Review, and Poetry. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and several state arts councils. He is also a playwright, and two of his plays were finalists in the Eugene O'Neil Theater Conference competition. He is currently Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at the University of Louisville.
"People whose lives are changed by alcohol and addiction have a special knowledge of the world's unsafety and unpredictability. They become intimate with chaos and shame, know well the consequences and limits of human control. Ordinary language may be inadequate to depict the intensities of their longing, grief, and desire for life. The poems in this anthology, edited by Sarabande Books' co-founders, Gorham and Skinner, rightly feel hard won-as if the language had been hauled, chiseled, sieved, and saved to let the voice contain, express, and transform difficult experience. The poems possess an unusual authority, making room for that undefined darkness, the between, from which meaning sometimes arises."-Poetry Calendar , New York, New York
"Last Call is a deeply moving collection of poems not only about the a
