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 to date.

Floyd Skloot's memoir, In the Shadow of Memory, won the 2004 Pen Center USA Literary Award, and the Chicago Tribune named it one of the Best Books of 2003. His acclaimed and award-winning poetry has been published in Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Poetry, and countless other magazines and journals, as well as being widely anthologized. He lives in Amity, Oregon, with his wife, the artist Beverly Hallberg.

"A poet of singular skill and subtle intelligence" (Harvard Review), Floyd Skloot has attracted a wide audience for his singular skill at writing poetry that lingers; his words are intimate, wise, and deeply affecting. While including the finest of his earlier poetry, Selected Poems concentrates on his work over the last two decades, a period defined by life-changing illness, deep love, years of living in the remote woods of western Oregon, and a passionate exploration of the meaning of memory, the power of creative impulse, and the mysterious places where dreams and reality meet.

Born in Brooklyn in 1947, Floyd Skloot has written five books of poetry, three memoirs, and three novels. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Poetry, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, and most of the leading journals in this country as well as overseas. He is a winner of the Emily Clark Balch Prize in Poetry from Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. Floyd Skloot's memoir, In the Shadow of Memory, won the PEN Center USA Literary Award, Independent Publisher Book Award, and was named one of the best books of 2003 by the Chicago Tribune.