About the Author
Floyd Skloot is the author of seventeen books, including two volumes of poems from Tupelo Press, and the acclaimed memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (2003) and The Wink of the Zenith (2008). The stories in Cream of Kohlrabi originally appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ontario Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, and other magazines. He and his wife, the artist Beverly Hallberg, live in Portland, Oregon. With his daughter Rebecca Skloot, he edited Best American Science Writing 2011.
Floyd Skloot was named one of fifty of the most inspiring authors in the world by Poets & Writers (January/February 2010): “Despite virus-induced brain damage, he writes with surprising tenderness and candor about recreating a life for himself and, in the process, makes us think about our own.”
Advanced Praise:
“Skloot is such a fine writer that he can—and does—write about eating ‘baloney and eggs’ and makes it seem fascinating.” —Publishers Weekly
“Throughout the book, natural images like the sound of the sea about…anchoring self in landscape, flora, fauna. Mind and memory rooted.” –Vince Gotera, North American Review
“… it takes great skill to respect the suffering of the sick and their families while also grasping and transforming it into a work of art. Floyd Skloot is the first poet I have run across in possession of such powers. Though far too many poets have tried to paste pathos on the page, hoping the overwhelm with raw power and impress with a rather egotistic display of profound feeling, Skloot impresses with an ear attuned to the counterpoint of sentence rhythm, rhyme, and meter, and with the true artist’s commitment to making the most private and personal suffering revealable to others through a selfless attention to the vivid scene and dispassionate narrative.” —James Wilson, Notre Dame Review
“In poem after amazing poem in Approximately Paradise, Floyd Skloot deploys form (a sonnet on his mother’s Alzheimer’s, a long narrative on the ghost of the legendary Dodger fielder Pee Wee Reese), continuously seeking that place where, Rilke tells us, beauty is born out of just-bearable terror. And again and again, he finds that place; finds it a place suffused with tenderness.” –Gregory Orr
The Harvard Review called Floyd Skloot “A poet of singular skill and subtle intelligence,” and radiating from the center of Approximately Paradise are poems that earn this praise by emoting universal themes like a mother’s love, acceptance, wholeness—themes that succeed in reminding us of an elegant and simple paradise that is always within our reach.
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-25-5