Skoog's first full-length collection captures and presents the truth of
the truth: our under-analyzed, overlooked, often fragile existences on
earth.--Dave Jarecki
Skoog's use of language is disorientating, vivid and surprising, all the
things I love about great poetry.--Nathan Moore
Ed Skoog purposefully blindfolds us, spins us around and dares us to
find a target. He wants us to be unbalanced in our interaction with the
work; he wants our experience to be unsettling, for the writing to
'arrive like a hostage, an ear, a finger in the mail' (from 'Party at
the Dump').--Carolee Sherwood
The Stranger writes, Ed Skoog's poetry is so ambitious it takes my
breath away.. he knows how to braid pop culture into small personal
melancholies and into large generosities.
X. J. Kennedy writes, This is the damnedest book. I love it like crazy.
Skoog is a dazzling new talent who not only promises, but achieves.
The phrase "Mister Skylight" is an emergency signal to alert a ship's
crew, but not its passengers, of an emergency. This debut collection is
alert to disasters--the flooding of New Orleans and the wildfires of
California--and also to the hope of rescue. Interior dramas of the self
are played out in a clash of poetic traditions, exuberant imagery, and
wild metaphor.
Ed Skoog, who worked for years in the basement of a museum in New
Orleans, developed personal connections to objects and paintings.
"Working on an exhibition about the building trades was important to
this book," he writes. "Spending weeks listening to the oral histories
of plasterers, steeplejacks, and carpenters connected me to my own
family's stories." Marked by uncommonly intense and considered use of
language, Skoog demonstrates a rich attention to form and allusive
narrative as he attends to the details of contemporary politics,
culture, place, and relationships.
. . . Not to be the one who left is to live in an alarm.
The unstraightened bed.
But don't I always bring bright souvenirs from our travels,
a feather, a coin, a bee? Astonishing in my palm.
Minutes past your touch, what our bodies were
is disappearing like a ship caught in polar ice.
Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1971. He earned degrees from
Kansas State University and the University of Montana. His poems have
been published in many magazines, including Poetry, American Poetry
Review, and The Paris Review. He lives in Seattle.
