"This is one of many books published this year. This is unlike almost all of them. Jeffrey Skinner's Salt Water Amnesia is an odd book, a stand-out book, definitely…. Skinner sets it up as a series of meditations—on the sea, that blankness, that eternity of salt and wave action—and modulates throughout in this sort of variable (and often great) collection. I think the thing I admire the most about it is its ability to follow its own lead, to wander freely through registers of language."—The Diagram

“Battalions of the ravenous,” our other possible selves— discarded selves, the penumbra of lived and unlived lives that Pessoa-like surrounds and attacks as well as sings in our brains—find voice in Jeffrey Skinner’s beautiful new book. “This life, enough for me” one poem ends, but the whole book denies it. In each person’s skin, Skinner implies, live many imagined importunate identities, from “The Prophet” to the man who finds that he has agreed to marry David Letterman. Good as the opening of the book is, by the time of “Theories & Inventions” we know that we are in the hands of a master."—Frank Bidart

"Whimsy, sweet absurdity, the kind of tender confabulation that shatters into merry laughter—it's a book full of images that never occurred before, and are hard to forget…. This is a book I can read over and over, delighting in rediscovering its visions and tang of salt…. This clear, generous voice nails moment after moment, and the book is already destined to be over-read in my hands, losing its crispness, sagging into the soft, corner-damaged handful that a well-enjoyed softcover becomes. —Beth Kannell, Vermont Review of Books

"Quiet, thoughtful, sympathetic, and mostly in prose, the meditations in Skinner's fifth volume reflect on middle age, on the death of his father, and on his year living by the Connecticut shoreline, where commuter trains shoot past shopping centers and whitecaps, and "all language moves out to sea." One series of prose poems uses ski lifts and Styrofoam cups to comment on improvement. Another series memorializes Skinner's father by alternating painful remembered events with bleakly comic, dreamlike (or Russell Edson-like) fantasies: 'I sewed my father into a specially designed, handmade bear suit.'… Skinner's few lineated poems are the best in the book: 'The Climbers," 'Darwin's Marathon,' and a few others find the verbal energy, and the bitterness kept in check, that distinguished his standout Gender Studies (2002) and remind followers how sharp this poet's language can be." —Publishers Weekly

"In the same six-line stanza of "Widow's Walk," Jeffrey Skinner can write, "If the heart could think, it would stop…," and "Sleep, the book that reads us," You think you could write these lines, they are so simple and direct. Yet of course you can't. You're not a poet with Skinner's unique gift of plain language artfully used to articulate the common life. This is not revelation, but rather memory. Skinner continually brings to mind—brings back to mind—moments everyone has experienced physically or in thought, but has not had the time or made the effort to reflect much on. Thus, there is in these poems a sense of familiarity; which is one thing that leads me to wrongly believe one could write the same words Skinner does. Skinner leads one to familiarity with aspects of one's life, often aspects one has missed, sometimes neglected."—Henry Berry, Midwest Book Review