Fictionaut Five: Lizzie Skurnick

Mar 19, 2009 in Fictionaut Five

checkin2ev21 “They snap shut with the satisfying click of the sleekest compact; they break open like perfectly shivered glass; they diagnose and recompose the heart’s and mind’s movements with a clinical yet sensual precision: these are Elizabeth Skurnick’s poems.” So says Maureen N. McLane in a new introduction to Lizzie Skurnick’s collection Check-In, recently reissued by Caketrain. The expanded second edition features 14 new poems.

Lizzie will be reading with Kate Christensen and Maud Newton at the Housing Works Cafe in New York on April 15. “You Could Marry Anyone” is a poem Lizzie started on Fictionaut and was just able to sneak into the book.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you spend your time?

Very easy — traveling and eating and gazing around in a stunned daze.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

There are so many! Most of Katherine Anne Porter and Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. I also love Alice Munro’s stories “Carried Away” and “A Wilderness Station,” as well as “The Buccaneers.” I mean, I’m just going to say EVERY BOOK in my house I’ve kept through more than three moves, here. “Intimations of Things Distant” and “Another Country,” for sure.

What are the websites you couldn’t live without?

I can live without any website. I resent the web and everything it hath wrought upon my life. I just thank God I grew up without its pernicious brain-tiring time-suck influence.

But I love YOUR site, Jurgen.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a novel that is a revisit of one of my favorite books ever written, as well as the completion of my poetry collection “Bit Parts.” I cannot express to you how slowly all of this is going.

Can you recommend a favorite story on Fictionaut?

I really love my friend Laurel’s “It’s a Boy!“

Bonus video: an animation of “Grand Central, Track 23” by Neil Subel for the Poetry Foundation.

One Reply

Joanne Saraceno
Apr 26th, 2009 at 2:05 pm

Today on Cspan you mentioned an author of Essays which you loved. What was her name and the title of the book? thank you.

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