Kentucky Swami

by Tim Skeen

Price 77 pages, $12.95 paper

ISBN 1-886157-33-2

The excellent poems in this collection set us down in a place where scars are "precise and dependable," holding the world together. In the tradition of James Wright, they speak of defeat in a flat voice. They also tell the sometimes astounding stories of our grace and humor and dignity, and how we might be redeemed through an astringent love. -- Michael Burns, 2001 Judge, John Ciardi Prize for Poetry

Tim Skeen's John Ciardi Prize-winning collection reveals a distanced compassion so keen it might draw blood from his readers. He retells our hard histories, men and women at work in dangerous and impossible circumstances--labor wars, poverty, early death, disease, and violence--to cry out to his beloved, "How can you want children/in spite of the ossuaries of this world?" Kentucky Swami answers the question by moving in close, the poems a vibrant celebration of our continuing lives. This book is marvelous! -- Hilda Raz

Tim Skeen's Kentucky Swami is American poetry in the largest sense; not only do we hear the great empathetic presence of Walt Whitman, James Wright, and Philip Levine, but Vallejo and Neruda sing here as well. Skeen is a skilled writer--direct and clear, a partisan of accessibility and heartbreak. He has written a book informed by beauty and surprise. -- Michael Collier

Few poetry collections are so aptly titled. With Tim Skeen as our spiritual guide among coal miners, steelworkers, soldiers, hillbillies, sojourners, prisoners, and the women who live with them, we travel paths both literal and figurative, as this poet maps their lines: from unemployment lines to the scar across a lover's abdomen to "the vascular-like bed of oil pipe/around the world." ...From Tai Chi to tomatoes, Buckeroos to Balkanites, Kentucky Swami bears brave testimony to our abiding need to celebrate "something common, something always near." -- John Gery

Tim Skeen was born in the coal-mining region of eastern Kentucky. He grew up in Lorain, Ohio, where his father had migrated to find work at the local steel mill. After working as a soldier and a laborer, Skeen eventually earned a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 1996, he returned to Appalachia to teach. For ten years, he has also served as a national disaster volunteer for the American Red Cross. He lives in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, with his wife, Pam Weiner, and daughter, Iris.

A recorded interview with this author is available from New Letters on the Air.