In conversation with Wendy Xu; 12:10 – 1:00 pm, Morristown & Morris Township Library
Emily Skillings
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collections Fort Not and Tantrums in Air, both published by The Song Cave. Skillings’s recent poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Granta, FOLDER, The Yale Review, and the New York Review of Books. She is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, and a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Skillings currently teaches creative writing at NYU and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.
MFOB featured book: Tantrums in Air
Emily Skillings’s highly anticipated second collection of poems, Tantrums in Air, is a wild romp through verbal reality, marking her as one of contemporary poetry’s shining stars of humor, insight, and edge. Skillings writes through various poetic forms, reminding the reader how tenuous the line can be between a poem and, say, an Amazon review of the poet’s first book. Featuring a ballet in four acts (“part ghost, part sponge / a lump of pure refusal”), addresses to past loves (“I circle the circle / Of a compact mirror, open”), and an unconventional treatise on education, Tantrums in Air is smart and honest, reinventing both what’s possible and what we should expect from poetry.
