Check-In

“Elizabeth Skurnick writes like Tom Waits trapped inside the body of a desperate housewife. Full of wry humor and libidinous musings, the poems in Check-In are both sharp and sly.”
—John Lewis, Baltimore Magazine

”They snap shut with the satisfying click of the sleekest compact; they break open like perfectly shivered glass; they diagnose and recompose the heart’s and mind’s movements with a clinical yet sensual precision: these are Elizabeth Skurnick’s poems. Pivoting between the masks of comedienne and tragedienne, Skurnick veers smartly between the ludic and the abyssal. This is erotically alert, urbane work, perfectly at home—which is to say, perfectly uncomfortable—in the ‘no-places’ of our times.”
—Maureen N. McLane, author of Same Life

Elizabeth Skurnick’s poetry has appeared in the Iowa Review, Barrow Street, The New Haven Review, The Pinch, the Delta Review, and the anthology Shade (Four Way Books, 2004). Her light verse has been featured in the Vintage book Best of the Blogs, on New York magazine online, and on NPR’s Weekend Edition. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Ucross, the VCCA, Blue Mountain, and the AWP Summer Seminars and Sewanee writing conference. “Grand Central, Track 23” was recently chosen for the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere series. A book of essays on young adult fiction, Shelf Discovery, will be published by HarperCollins in 2009.