"Skin is the membrane that both separates us from this world and gives us shape in it. It is the parchment that the world writes on with its injuries. And of course it is with the 'hunger of skin for skin' that we love one another. April Lindner knows all this and more—about how we live in bodies, as bodies. In Skin, she embodies her knowledge in poems that are as wise as they are beautiful and as exciting as they are smart. Skin is a suberb achievement and a delight to read."

Andrew Hudgins

"April Lindner's poems are attentive to both the music of language and the quotidian melodies of ordinary experience. Whether rendering the nuances of a moment or the dramatic sweep of a life, as in the series on Alma Mahler, it's ultimately the skin of the world these poems seek to get under. Often, they do."

Kim Addonizio

"With their beautifully textured surfaces, April Lindner's poems explore 'the hunger of skin for skin.' She combines the poet's lyrical compression with the novelist's eye for the telling domestic detail, and, as a result, her evocations of inner lives feel utterly honest and absorbing. Knowing that 'beauty is the lie we'd carve and starve for,' she also notes 'the daily tug/of obsolescence.' This remarkable debut volume reveals a poet already mature in both vision and technique."

David Mason

“Skin is the 11th winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Poetry Prize, awarded by Texas Tech University Press and named in honor of a former TTUP poetry editor. Lindner, who teaches English at St. Joseph's University, seems well-deserving. She has a sharp eye for detail: "daylight, rationed by Venetian slats," "the white moth of a kiss / blown from a boy's plump lips," "burnt / sienna moustache," "milky way of red freckles" - these are picked at random from just two pages. She also has a well-nigh flawless ear for lyrical phrases graced by the uneven rhythm extolled by the French symbolist Paul Verlaine.”

Frank Wilson, The Philadelphia Inqurier