REVIEWS AND COMMENTARY

 

 

Secret Frequencies: A New York Education:

 

"John Skoyles is a wonderful storyteller, by turns hilarious and street-smart and wise, and he hasn't forgotten what it was like to grow up in the most urban of urban environments.  This is a fine and beautifully detailed book."

            -- Charles Baxter

 

"A deeply engaging and funny book by a marvelous writer."

            -- Tracy Kidder

 

"A salty, entertaining coming-of-age story with a real-life Sopranos cast.  Skoyles' evocation of gritty, unhomogenized Manhattan in the post-Beat era particularly won my heart."

            -- Joyce Johnson

 

"Though known as a poet, Skoyles brings a novelist's poise and pace to Secret Frequencies.  His characters emerge fully formed and engage the reader's attention and sympathy.  He captures the enormous mystery and thrill of a young man in the city."

            -- The New York Sun

 

"John Skoyles' memoir has the texture and humor of "Angela's Ashes," offering an Italian-American boyhood in Queens and coming of age in the Manhattan of the 1960s, as told by a wonderfully generous, honest and vulnerable mid-life poet."

            -- The Boston Sunday Globe

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 Definition of the Soul:

 

 "In Definition of the Soul, John Skoyles again displays his talents for bull's eye images.  In this and many other poems here, Skoyles scrapes at the surface of everyday things and finds a wonderful strangeness just underneath."

            -- Harvard Review

 

"The best poems in John Skoyles’s Definition of the Soul find solace in small scale. Their particular skill represents one of the best possibilities of the lyric."

            -- Ploughshares

 

“John Skoyles’ poems are both witty and very serious.  He deals with the large contemporary contradictions in a language that is specific, original and bitingly clear.  Skoyles’ poetry is fascinating because he is clear-eyed but passionate, sarcastic but grave, all at the same time.” 

-- Alan Dugan

 

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 Generous Strangers:

 

 “They say it doesn’t matter whether a good writer is also a good person.  John Skoyles is both, which makes all the difference in this book, since its subject is nothing less than how we live together.  Elegantly written, wry, and wise, Generous Strangers is a book to give, and, with luck, to be given.  John Skoyles has made a gift of himself.”

-- James Carroll, author of An American Requiem, winner of the National Book Award

 

“A compassionate and loving – and funny – tribute to everyday life.  I found a moment of grace in each of John Skoyles’ richly textured stories.”

            -- Steven Lewis, author of Zen and the Art of Fatherhood

 

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Additional Comments:

 

“In short lyrics that waste not a word, Skoyles reflects on death, guilt, religion, and other central topics, with metaphors as unusual as they are utterly right.”

-- Booklist

 

 

“Poems written with a receptive ear for music, a visceral sense of rhythm, and a penetrating vision through the ordinary.”

-- American Book Review

 

 

Skoyles' poems have a kind of racy urgency that reflects the city's pace.  They finish themselves in a page, tight and compact, using the shortcut of simile, the quick bridge of humor.  For poems so full of linguistic playfulness, there is a surprising accuracy of perception.

           -- The Georgia Review

 

His lyric, compassionate and observant poems project simultaneously a dignity and a modesty which is not quite like any other contemporary poet.

         -- Puerto del Sol