This is the story of a boy from working class Queens who discovers poetry, an unlikely obsession that leads him from a Jesuit college's all male, sex-starved campus to the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and then to the Iowa Writers Workshop. He makes up for his previous lack of romance while at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and goes on to teach at two colleges, with a stay at Yaddo in between. John crosses paths with Raymond Carver, Robert Creeley and John Cheever and receives guidance from mentors like Stanley Kunitz and strangers like Allen Ginsberg. A Moveable Famine is ultimately the portrait of an individual and an age. Above all it is a book about identity.
"Skoyles launches this crackling autobiographical novel with a brash preface. This passion for the poetic life is treated with both mockery and sympathy, as we follow Skoyles witty vignette by witty vignette, drink by drink, he chronicles the peculiar codes of the competitive workshop culture. Quietly emerging from this raucous, entertaining book is a portrait of the aesthetic education of a poet
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Skoyles' prose is chock-full of images that must have been drawn from the poetic corner of his creative mind. There may be no rhyme in Skoyles' poetry, but there's every reason to read his delightful book."
