Ahadada Books is pleased to present Anne-Marie Derése in Translation & The Green Parrot by Judith Skillman. Anne-Marie Derése in Translation & The Green Parrot is the seventeenth release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series. Download it by clicking here.

Over the past three decades Judith Skillman has written and published numerous poems for books, journals, and anthologies.  She has collaborative translations from Portuguese, Italian, and French. Skillman's publications include FIELD, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, The Northwest Review, and Midwest Quarterly.  She has ten books of poems.

From 1977 - 1978 she held a teaching assistantship at the University of Maryland, while working towards her masters degree in English Literature.  She received the King County Arts Commission’s Publication Prize in 1987, judged by Madeline DeFrees.  This prize enabled her to find a publisher for her first book, “Worship of the Visible Spectrum” (Breitenbush Books.) In 1991 Skillman was awarded a Washington State Arts Commission Writer’s Fellowship. 

Read more about Judith Skillman here.

Skillman's poems move out from their opening point meditatively and delicately to embrace distant sights, memories of the past, other countries, and also mythologies and similarities. "Bearing the universal/forward in each particular...," she writes in "Cardoon." She is not seeking anything in this movement--neither knowledge nor possession nor control. The movement is not an urge, but rather the natural penchant to connect with what is beyond the immediate self. Things within the broader world are connected by a tissue of shared qualities. "Increments of blue and pink chalk/can be made..."-- from "On Circe's Island". Or, as she writes in "Zaydee," "...pink fragments claim/the edge of a wave...." Skillman's poems are created by following where an initial sensed quality leads; and all of the world, from objects to envisionings, is spun together by qualities similar and different.
        —Henry Berry

Download  Anne-Marie Derése in Translation & The Green Parrot by Judith Skillman by clicking here .