Mister Skylight

Ed Skoog

“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.

status	Copy #1 (7527): in
genre	Literature and Fiction » Poetry
publisher	Copper Canyon Press
publish date	2009
popularity	checked out 0 time(s)