Books by Floyd Skloot
The Best American Science Writing 2011
by Jesse Cohen, Rebecca Skloot, Floyd Skloot
The 2011 edition of the popular annual series that Kirkus Reviews hailed as “superb brain candy,” Best American Science Writing 2011 continues the tradition of gathering the most crucial, thought-provoking and engaging science writing of the year together into one extraordinary volume. Edited by Rebecca Skloot, award-winning science writer, contributing editor for Popular Science magazine, and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, along with her father, Floyd Skloot, multiple award-winning non-fiction writer and poet, and past contributor to the series, Best American Science Writing 2011 sheds brilliant light on the most amazing and confounding scientific issues and achievements of our time.
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Far West: Poems
by Floyd Skloot
Floyd Skloot’s Far West intertwines the past and present, as time alternates between racing and standing still. Crafting poems that confront memory lapses and painful recollections, Skloot traces his moments of purest perception and expression: his wife practicing music, his daughter finding delight in the presence of wildlife, Vladimir Nabokov able to lose himself when playing goalie in a soccer match. A poem about a forgotten word or name can lead to one about a song that refuses to stop playing over and over in our minds, or to an evocation of a long-dead futuristic novelist who comes back from the afterlife to find a world even stranger than any he imagined. In poems that range from traditional forms and short lyrics to longer narratives and free verse, Skloot explores how emotional experiences―memory and forgetting, love and loss, reverie and urgent attention―all come together in our search for coherence and authentic self-expression.
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The Phantom of Thomas Hardy
by Floyd Skloot
What's in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners' physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range--often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village's understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations.
Methodologically innovative, Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process--the naming of Europeans--can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents--"the home burner," "Leopard," "Beat, beat," "The hippopotamus-hide whip"--clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.
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SELECTED POEMS
by Floyd Skloot
Poetry. Born in Brooklyn in 1947, Floyd Skloot has written five books of poetry, three memoirs, and three novels. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Poetry, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, and most of the leading journals in this country as well as overseas. He is a winner of the Emily Clark Balch Prize in Poetry from Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. Floyd Skloot's memoir, In the Shadow of Memory, won the PEN Center USA Literary Award, Independent Publisher Book Award, and was named one of the best books of 2003 by the Chicago Tribune. "[Floyd] Skloot continues to be a highly disciplined poet, confronting chaos to capture and tame his enemy. There is ferocity living in his forms, coexisting with the sweetness of vanquishing sentiment"--Prairie Schooner.
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