"In the early 1990s, in his volume The Bears And Other Poems,
Knute Skinner embarked on an extraordinary poetic project ? the
elaboration of short poetic fictions. In the intervening years he has
become a master of this charged and compelling form. These short poems
are exquisitely compressed narratives delineating and exposing lives
often within a relational context. The narrators are a diverse bunch:
adulterers, deviants, adventurers, lovers, friends, whose utterances and
scraps of dialogue frame the foibles, truths, frailties and enduring
alliances between characters strewn across a variety of contexts. In
some of the poems there is an undisclosed but implied secret that
entreats the reader to return, to name what has been conflated and
intuitively sussed, and to define the intriguingly elusive and alluring
truth of the poem. There are very few books of poetry that you would run
back into a burning building to retrieve. Make no mistake, An Upside Down World is one of them." Frank Golden