The author of In the Shadow of Memory and A World of Light uncovers a unique and telling perspective on the forging of a writer's individual sensibility in a memoir that explores fundamental questions about how life shapes the creative spirit and how the writer makes sense of it all.
One March morning, writer Floyd Skloot was inexplicably struck by an attack of unrelenting vertigo that ended 138 days later as suddenly as it had begun. With body and world askew, everything familiar had transformed. Nothing was ever still. Revertigo is Skloot’s account of that unceasingly vertiginous period, told in an inspired and appropriately off-kilter form. This intimate memoir—tenuous, shifting, sometimes humorous—demonstrates Skloot’s considerable literary skill honed as an award-winning essayist, memoirist, novelist, and poet. His recollections of a strange, spinning world prompt further musings on the forces of uncertainty, change, and displacement that have shaped him from childhood to late middle age, repeatedly knocking him awry, realigning his hopes and plans, even his perceptions. From the volatile forces of his mercurial, shape-shifting early years to his obsession with reading, acting, and writing, from the attack of vertigo to a trio of postvertigo (but nevertheless dizzying) journeys to Spain and England, and even to a place known only in his mother’s unhinged fantasies, Skloot makes sense of a life’s phantasmagoric unpredictability. Finalist, Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction, Oregon Book Awards
From the winner of the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction In his award-winning memoir "In the Shadow of Memory," Floyd Skloot told the hard story of coming to terms with a brain-ravaging virus. "A World of Light," written with the same insight, passion, and humor that distinguished the earlier volume, moves Skloot's story from the reassembly of a self after neurological calamity to the reconstruction of a shattered life. More than fifteen years after a viral attack compromised his memory and cognitive powers, Skloot now must do the vital work of recreating a cohesive life for himself even as he confronts the late stages of his mother's advancing dementia. With tenderness and candor, he finds surprising connection with her where it had long been missing, transforming the end of her life into a time of unexpected renewal. At the same time, Skloot and his wife are building a rich new life at the center of a small isolated forest on a hillside in rural Oregon, where a dwindling water supply and the bitter assaults of the weather bring an elemental perspective to his attempts to make himself once more at home in the world. By turns poignant, funny, and frightening, "A World of Light" balances the urgency to capture fragmented, fleeting memories with the necessity of living fully in the present.
Floyd Skloot’s Far West intertwines the past and present, as time alternates between racing and standing still. Crafting poems that confront memory lapses and painful recollections, Skloot traces his moments of purest perception and expression: his wife practicing music, his daughter finding delight in the presence of wildlife, Vladimir Nabokov able to lose himself when playing goalie in a soccer match. A poem about a forgotten word or name can lead to one about a song that refuses to stop playing over and over in our minds, or to an evocation of a long-dead futuristic novelist who comes back from the afterlife to find a world even stranger than any he imagined. In poems that range from traditional forms and short lyrics to longer narratives and free verse, Skloot explores how emotional experiences—memory and forgetting, love and loss, reverie and urgent attention—all come together in our search for coherence and authentic self-expression.
The Snow's Music continues award-winning poet Floyd Skloot's lyrical and narrative explorations of memory, love, loss, and artistic expression. At once musical and precise, formal and fluid, Skloot's poems balance inner and outer vision, past and present experience, meditation and observation, humor and sadness. Skloot explores human resilience in the face of sudden change and radical shifts of perception that define creative endeavor when the world refuses to cohere. Whether the author is recalling lessons learned as a young actor in the role of a Shakespearean clown, thinking about the painter Georges Braque reassembling himself after wartime head injuries, or imagining his volatile parents reunited in the afterlife following his mother's death at age ninety-six, Skloot's accessible poems move and delight, creating his most emotional and engaging work yet."--BOOK JACKET.
In December 1988 Floyd Skloot was stricken by a virus that targeted his brain, leaving him totally disabled and utterly changed. In the Shadow of Memory is an intimate picture of what it is like to find oneself possessed of a ravaged memory and unstable balance and confronted by wholesale changes in both cognitive and emotional powers. Skloot also explores the gradual reassembling of himself, putting together his scattered memories, rediscovering the meaning of childhood and family history, and learning a new way to be at home in the world. Combining the author?s skills as a poet and novelist, this book finds humor, meaning, and hope in the story of a fragmented life made whole by love and the courage to thrive.
Poet, essayist, and novelist Floyd Skloot continues his exploration of human resilience in 'The Fiddler's Trance', his third full-length collection of poems. Skloot's poems investigate the phenomenon of sudden change in our lives, when all we understood about ourselves and our worlds is called into question and we must find a new way of seeing.
The End of Dreams is a celebration of the human capacity for adaptation amid the cycles of loss and renewal that characterize our intimate lives. Floyd Skloot mixes dramatic monologue with meditative and narrative verse in poems that explore family experiences, the lives of artists, historical crisis, love, nature, illness, and sudden, unpredictable change. The poet describes moments rich in complexity: when a grandfather’s intentional loss at cards is really a victory of love; when Flannery O’Connor’s waxing and waning illness becomes a merciful strengthening of her faith in death and resurrection; when dreams and reality merge for a man in his final seconds of life. Musical, sometimes funny, sometimes deeply poignant, twining nostalgia with a hard-earned acceptance of the present, these accessible, emotional poems probe the power of our transformative imagination.
Floyd Skloot’s seven previous poetry collections include The End of Dreams, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and The Snow’s Music. His work has won three Pushcart Prizes and the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Edited by Rebecca Skloot, award-winning science writer and New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and her father, Floyd Skloot, an award-winning poet and writer, and past contributor to the series, The Best American Science Writing 2011 collects into one volume the most crucial, thought-provoking, and engaging science writing of the year. Culled from a wide variety of publications, these selections of outstanding journalism cover the full spectrum of scientific inquiry, providing a comprehensive overview of the most compelling, relevant, and exciting developments in the world of science. Provocative and engaging, The Best American Science Writing 2011 reveals just how far science has brought us—and where it is headed next.
?Insouciant? and ?irreverent? are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore?s books?and, invariably, ?hilarious.? Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, ?A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem,? this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own. ø Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author?s early life?the Kennedy assassination, Nixon?s resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few?shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today?s world for all of us who spent our formative years in the ?50s, ?60s, and ?70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms?a coroner?s report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan?aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America.
A collection of poems about the unexpected ways a life can be transformed through illness, passion, love and understanding. Poppies is an insightful poetic meditation on the American family.
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