Check-In
First Edition Released August 2005;
Second Edition Released February 2009
Caketrain Books
“Skurnick has cut her lyrics to the quick, shedding excessive words and animating what’s left with unusual emotional weight, with such themes as the recklessness of young love and the diminishment implicit in most social roles. Proof again that a good writer can shape any form into an expressive vehicle.” —The Brooklyn Rail [link]
“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
“Skurnick has seen the ads; she has surveyed the skylines; she has heard the safe-sex and sex-positive mantras; she has outlived the feminist third-wave; she has practiced her piano; she has outstared the obvious; she has pondered her Auden; she has heard the postracial blahblah; she has assessed her lovers and her heart; she has assessed your lovers and your heart; she has gone to the movies; she has read her pulp fiction; she knows her Horace; she has fractured personae; she has pondered her legions of notional husbands; she was there, she remembered, she is the woman. Check in.”–From the introduction by Maureen N. McLane, author of Same Life
See poems from Check-In:
In 2008, “Grand Central, Track 23” was chosen for the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere, an animated series created in collaboration with students at the University of Milwaukee.
Featured on Morning Edition [NPR.org]
Interviewed on the Bat Segundo Show [MP3]
Aaron Henkin of WYPR’s “The Signal” interviews Lizzie Skurnick about Check-In [MP3]
Interviewed on Bluepoppy [link]
Read a sample passage from the book
The articles that inspired the book
A gallery of covers from the classic books
Check-In, a collection of poems
