Reviewed by Kathleen Bednarek
Dreamboat
by Jeffrey Skinner
Finishing Line Press
2026 (forthcoming)
In dreams, water often symbolizes the subconscious and our underlying emotional state. Poet Jeffrey Skinner finds the perfect set piece in this concept, using the metaphorical container of a dreamboat to transport readers through prose poems that fully explore the cinematic, surreal possibilities of the form.
In Dreamboat, readers journey deeper with a steady emotional confluence, following the speaker, joined at times by his wife, Sarah, across Europe and through various flights of landscapes and psychological locations.
We enter the collection meeting the speaker as he experiences a bout of insomnia during a river cruise in Germany. The Rhine River transforms into a pack of stampeding dogs of various breeds. Logic does not rule—the poems are untethered, capable of moving anywhere at any moment. The beginning poems in Dreamboat easily snapped into focus for me as part-triptych, part-daydream with rich, alluring detail and asides that clarify rather than distract.
Hidden parts of the mind come up with ideas, decisions, daydreams, etc., long before they rise to conscious awareness. All artists know this, instinctively. (“The Dutch Rabbit”)
What makes Dreamboat so striking is that it also never undermines the emotional underlayers within the fantastic. Skinner’s ability to turn the surreal into an entry point for philosophical inquiry is a rare feat. The writing follows a distinct arc: we meet the acknowledgment of the dreamlike nature of what is occurring, move into larger inquiries within the speaker’s mind, find a moment of lucidity in the surreal experience, and then meander through the narrative into a depth of imagery that returns to that poetic becoming and the broader emotions of the poem.
In one scene, a film night in the cruise ship’s lounge unexpectedly features footage of the speaker as a child. The speaker yearns to enter the frame, only to realize his parents would never recognize him as an older man—pushed out of the frame, displaced from a past where he no longer belongs. In the collection’s architecture, anything is plausible, and Skinner leans into this freedom with clear delight. The poems evoke Lynchian tableaus that could easily drift into pure abstraction, yet the poems move toward meaningful resolution by the compression of their narratives.
I’m flying under my own power over a desert. Below me I see the framework of several pyramids, or, they may be swing sets for the children of giants. It’s difficult to tell. Flying itself feels more like swimming underwater than moving through air—there is the same blur and thickness. (“The Velocity of Money”)
In an archival interview with the blog How a Poem Happens, Skinner explained a key aspect of his creative process that feels prescient when reading Dreamboat. Describing how he approaches the first spark of a poem, Skinner notes:
I generally begin by re-placing myself within the perceptual space of a memory.
In fact, that very interview featured a poem sharing the same water theme: “Elegy With Yellow Boat.” Now reading Dreamboat, one senses the natural culmination of Skinner’s creative instinct. By re-entering or redeveloping memory not as a static record, but as a fluid, perceptual space, Skinner gives his imagination free rein while keeping readers grounded. If you have ever read Matthias Svalina’s poems from his Dream Delivery Service, Skinner’s collection shares that clear connection to the subconscious in the writing but takes a deeper dive.
Consider this line from “The Closed Circle” later in the collection. As the speaker waits to see if a broken Ferris wheel can ever be fixed, he reflects:
As always, nothing was more pleasing to me than bringing something new into the world.
He then turns inward, admitting no one would really care if he ever stopped creating, yet acknowledging that this thought has never stopped him before. It is a fortunate belief: Skinner’s unique perspective and mastery of craft make Dreamboat a worthwhile ride through a fascinating mind.
Dreamboat is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press this year. His last collection, Sober Ghost, was published by C&R Press in 2024. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in that same year, and in 2015 was given an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for literature. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Diagram, Volt, and The Paris and Threepenny Reviews.
About the reviewer: Kathleen Bednarek is a writer living in Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA from Wilkes University.