Reviewed by Kurt Olsson
Oppression
by Judith Skillman
Shanti Arts Publishing
Paperback, 88 pp, ISBN: 978-1-971191-00-3, US$16.95, April 2026
Judith Skillman’s Oppression contains language—rich, allusive, and whip-smart, filled with mordant humor—that is easy enough to parse. What makes the poems so difficult, so oppressive, however, is the profound and wrenching emotional weight they carry. Collectively, the lyric narratives in Oppression work like—to use an image her astronomer father, the subject of several poems, would have appreciated—a black hole, drawing in and seemingly extinguishing all light around it. Skillman’s poems are not meant for the timid or retiring. Forty years and 20-plus books into her career, Skillman refuses to “go gentle into that good night.”
Broken into five sections, the collection presents a dystopia fraught with danger, pain, anger, violence, war, and sickness, much of which is refracted through the lives and stories of the speaker and her family. Her poems, however, rarely are enacted at the purely personal level. They are “hard-wired,” to use Skillman’s phrase, to Western culture and history. Early in the collection, poems reimagine the stories of characters who, in one form or another, were victimized: Penelope, by her philandering husband; Demeter, by Zeus and Hades; and Jonah, by the Judaic-Christian God. Interwoven with these poems are others that give readers a window into the speaker’s Jewish heritage. In Oppression, two kinds of making are contrasted: making a home versus making war. The collection begins with a poem, “Two of Every,” describing a woman sewing dresses for herself and some unnamed other: “I make do with making / rather than being.” Later in Oppression, Skillman presents a sequence of poems set in Germany and the United States before, during, and just after the Holocaust. The scenes may be different, but the situations are similar: women strive to build and maintain; men strive to undermine and destroy.
The third section of the collection pivots from the collective to the individual, to the poet’s own battles with pain and fear resulting from debilitating injury and disease—in this case, the poet’s body literally at war with itself. The fourth section builds and expands on this theme by asking just who or what is responsible for this pain: Man, God, or Nature. The answer: all of them and none of them. Only in the final section does Skillman give readers a way one can cope with the terrible odds humanity faces. Not unexpectedly, the collection returns to the theme of making—keeping a garden, playing music, painting—and its curative power. But to her credit, Skillman is wise and skeptical enough never to claim that making alone can ever fully redeem. Instead, despite the depressing and impossible odds, one must “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” or in Skillman’s more muted, less violent, less male words in the collection’s final poem, “Always Gardening”: “In the face of this dejected sun lying low / against trees / I vow once more to let whatever lies beneath a soul trill / summer, summer, summer.”
About the reviewer: Kurt Olsson has published three full-length poetry collections, most recently The Unnumbered Anniversaries from Fernwood Press (2025). His poems have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, and Southern Review. For more, visit kurtolsson.com.