From Chris Banks’ The Woodlot
"Johanna Skibsrud’s Medium out with Book*hug Press is a rhapsody of voices and imaginative conversations with powerful historical females, both the exalted kind and the forgotten, making for a poetic dialectic that satisfies both mind and heart, and reminds us that, like the work of Gwendolyn MacEwen or the recently passed American poet Louise Glück, that persona, myth and history are rich territories for individual poets seeking greater connection and a way to, if not transcend, to enrich individual lived experience."
Open Book interview -- Medium
“All the individual voices the poems evoke are mediums in some sense—sometimes in a spiritual or intellectual sense (conveyors of wisdom or ideas), other times in a physical or biological sense (conveyors of text or other bodies), and still others in a cultural sense (conveyors of myth and memory). I wanted the collection to celebrate the continuities of experience and knowledge across the apparent and real limitations of space, time and perspective. I also wanted to think about the ways that we transmit experience—and at the same time remain vulnerable and open to transmissions from others.”
For the complete interview, published by Open Book, please follow this link.
Poetry Foundation Review of Medium
“Skibsrud masterfully plays with language […] to reveal the poetry in tearing down barriers that have held one back.”For the full review by Leonora Simonovis, published on the Poetry Foundation’s “Harriet Books” review platform (February 2024), follow this link.
Richler Library "Shelf Portrait"
"It’s a funny, vertiginous feeling to stand in front of one’s own bookshelf and imagine each book as a sort of porthole opening, potentially, onto a nearly infinite network of other barely-transmittable experiences; to imagine all the ideas and emotions, not-quite-fully-expressed; the missed allusions, the various ways juxtapositions and metaphors might otherwise function, for myself at different moments, or for a different person at a different time. Funny. Dizzying—and strange. To think of all the crossed-out words and paragraphs, whole chapters or sections either deleted or completely revised… As well as—of course—all the books that didn’t get written, because of the one that eventually did."
Today, a #ShelfPortrait from Canadian-American writer, Johanna Skibsrud. Skibsrud considers the book as both an aesthetic and utilitarian object, especially in relation to the publication of her debut novel, The Sentimentalists (first drafted as a master's thesis in Concordia’s creative writing program). Published by a small-scale press, the book won the country’s biggest literary prize in 2010, sparking a debate in the Canadian literary scene over the relative value of content and form — a debate Skibsrud then teases out in relation to her library as a whole. To read, visit https://richlerlibrary.ca/.../johanna-skibsrud-shelf....
Review of The Poetic Imperative, The Wallace Stevens Journal
Johanna Skibsrud’s The Poetic Imperative is a lucid, elegantly written, ambitious, theoretically sophisticated, and sometimes moving inqui- ry into difficult and original poets, beginning with Wallace Stevens, extend- ing into Muriel Rukeyser, and concluding with quite recent work by several contemporary poets and two artists. Read more here.