Political Cactus Poems

Skinner's work engages the various meanings of life outdoors, in the shape of a changing response to questions posed by the environments the poet physically inhabits. In part, the poetry operates as an instrument of research into a particular natural environment or a geological formation or species. In exchange, it offers forms of life measured to particular places, an invitation to inhabit the evolutionary imagination of the senses and of those places. His first book-length collection, Political Cactus Poems, which stem from the poet's life in the Southwest, challenges the pristine agenda of nature poetry by hybridizing themes from the lives of humans and cacti.