I Offer This Container: New & Selected Poems s a distillation of the forty plus years Jeffrey Skinner has dedicated to writing poems that have been delighting and provoking readers in the U.S. and around the world. It includes essential work from six published volumes, beginning with his debut collection, Late Stars, from Wesleyan University Press in 1985. Since then Skinner’s work has gathered many prizes and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and individual artist grants from the Howard and Ingram Merrill Foundations. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Poetry (Chicago), Slate Magazine, and many other journals, and his books have been winners in The National Poetry Series, the Crab Orchard Open Poetry Contest, and, in 2016, of the Field Poetry Prize.
“The uniqueness of Jeffrey Skinner’s poems is that they are the products of a consciousness which refuses to be guiltless . . . These poems, by their example, aspire for us all to that good which is spiritual vitality—in these times a necessity.”
“Jeffrey Skinner is one of the finest of America’s younger poets . . . Although it’s hard to make mortality new, Skinner’s thoughts on the subject are anything but hackneyed or didactic. They shimmer with the mysteries one might expect of the soul itself.”
