Check-In, by Elizabeth Skurnick. Aug 2005; 2nd Ed Feb 2009
5 3/8" × 8 5/16" × 90 pp.
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“Brilliant, compassionate, gorgeous and deeply funny, Lizzie Skurnick’s poems are concerned with what it means to be a human, and a woman, at the awkward beginning of the 21st century. The spun ‘I’ of Skurnick’s poems—from the bored wife of a dermatologist, to a slick-talking private eye, to the wisecracking heart—is one smart cookie, who observes the world brutally, and with love.”
Eliza Griswold, author of Wideawake Field
“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. 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 Check-In was chosen by Jim Daniels as the winning entrant in the 2004 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. The rarest of specimens, Lizzie not only acknowledges but engages an oft-forgotten poetic history of metric and sonic technique, all the while throwing her subjects into an unmistakably modern relief—exposing the heart, then dicing it into sharp and shapely slivers of verse. This expanded edition features a new cover photograph, fourteen new poems, and a foreword by Maureen McLane.
Acknowledgments
Barrow Street: “My Husband is the Husband of Five Other Women,” “My Husband is a Broker at Bear, Stearns”; The Delta Review: “Two Women”; The Iowa Review: “My Husband is a State Trooper,” “My Husband is a Dermatologist,” “My Husband Was a Spokesman for the President”; The Ledge: “Six Men Sestina”; The Melic Review: “Chastity in Gomorrah,” “Persephone In Hades”; New Haven Review: “Rake,” “Ring,” “Bill,” “Choose Your Preferences,” “Wait, There’s More,” “Ghazal (Morning),” “Ghazal (Evening),” “Ghazal (Afternoon),” “Hi-Tech Hotel”; The Pinch: “Something New”; Shade: “Grand Central, Track 23,” “Mt. Desert Island,” “Tyringham, 1998,” “Wild Kingdom,” “Tenants,” “Angel Eyes,” “Check-In.” Text Copyright 2005, 2008 Elizabeth Skurnick. Cover image Copyright 2008 Eliot Shepard. Used by permission.