Sober Ghost - by Jeffrey Skinner (Paperback)

About the Book

In the elegiac poems of Sober Ghost Jeffrey Skinner laments, and laments with, the ghosts of the past, including the ghost of his own alcoholic self, the most stubborn and instructive ghost of all.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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: