Came Home to Winter

Poetry. Skillman's new collection explores themes of exile, nostalgia, and chronic illness. Artists, literary, and mythic figures who travel through these poems include Andy Warhol, Günter Grass, Iphigenia, and the Shakespearean characters Prospero and Miranda. Sub-themes include the fear of water and the father-daughter relationship. Water is a tool the subconscious uses for feelings; here, the chance that trauma will surface remains omnipresent. Totem animals offer analogies from nature that suffering in the organic world may transmogrify into beauty. This book was funded in part by Artist Trust of Washington State.

... There is something about these pieces that is chill without being icy or bitter, wise without being cynical, and as striking as slanted autumn light glimpsed through tree branches.--The Pedestal Magazine

... Judith Skillman takes up again the tools of naturalistic observation and mythical allusion to examine difficult truths about the interior life of the self and its drives toward intimacy and seclusion, eroticism and entropy, as well as the paradox and complexity inherent in familial relationships.--Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom, The Iowa Review

As Skillman's poems seek to understand rather than deny suffering, they rarely conclude in clear resolution; rather, they acknowledge that wounds live unhealed and questions exist unanswered...(the) poems traverse through changes that manifest from living a full life. Her metaphors suggest not shrinking from scars that result from these changes, but instead learning to embrace and accept the wound as an illuminating source.--Marcene Gandolfo

I believe it was Rimbaud who said that genius is the ability to recall one's entire childhood. Whether or not Judith Skillman can recall her entire childhood I cannot say, but what she does recall--and it's a great deal--she turns into poems of compelling and aching urgency.--J. R. Solonche