photo credit: Ken Woroner

“Skibsrud is interested in the ways in which poetry is a practice that moves us toward the unthinkable” — Ryan Fitzpatrick, University of Toronto Quarterly

"Reading Island is a searing, vertiginous experience. Hailing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to interrogate our current moment in history, Skibsrud has created an uncanny and uncomfortable representation of power deeply corrupted. The text feels both historic and futuristic; it is discomfiting and necessary. Don’t look away." —Erin Wunker, author of Notes From a Feminist Killjoy

“At some point in my relationship with "The nothing that is," I began to forget that I was reading a collection of essays on art, literature, and being, and began, instead, to believe that I was reading a guidebook on how to approach and appreciate outer space. Because, in her recuperative and intimate readings of the often despairing, always life-affirming schisms between what is expressed and what remains inexpressible, Johanna Skibsrud has written a manifesto of liminal, reverberative space, as essential to our understanding of poetry and art, as to that of black holes and the Milky Way.” —Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall

“Deeply compassionate and beautiful…. Like The Sentimentalists, Quartet explores the limits of moral freedom and the mutability of human perceptions. But its characters are less important in themselves than as notes in an all-encompassing, eternal music.” —The Globe and Mail

“[It] is exhilarating to join [Skibsrud] working at these bracing heights, where no abstraction – not God, not time, not death, not art, not the meaning of life – is out of bounds.” – Joanna Scutts, Washington Post

“Quartet for the End of Time is a brilliant work of art, and it is brilliant in so many ways—its dense, rich, and immaculate prose, its vivid evocation of a watershed period in American history, its high-stakes political and personal drama, and, above all, its intimate and completely compelling portraits of human beings struggling to do the right thing under ambiguous moral circumstances.  This wholly realized book has everything I crave in a work of fiction.”—Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried