Ed Skoog

Thirty-six of the most interesting writers in the Pacific Northwest came together for a week-long marathon of writing live on stage. The result? Hotel Angeline, a truly inventive novel that surprises at every turn of the page. Something is amiss at the Hotel Angeline, a rickety former mortuary perched atop Capitol Hill in rain-soaked Seattle. Fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin is fixing the plumbing, the tea, and all the problems of the world, it seems, in her landlady mother’s absence. The quirky tenants—a hilarious mix of misfits and rabble-rousers from days gone by—rely on Alexis all the more when they discover a plot to sell the Hotel. Can Alexis save their home? Find her real father? Deal with her surrogate dad’s dicey past? Find true love? Perhaps only their feisty pet crow, Habib, truly knows. Provoking interesting questions about the creative process, this novel is by turns funny, scary, witty, suspenseful, beautiful, thrilling, and unexpected.

Travelers Leaving for the City is a long song of arrivals and departures, centered around the murder of the poet's grandfather in 1955 in a Pittsburgh hotel, exploring how such events frame memory, history and language for those they touch. The poems probe the anonymity of cities, and the crucible of travel. The historical impact of arousal, rage, regret, and forgiveness is seen in visions of interrogations and hotels. These poems explore how family bonds, and disruptions shape, the mind and language, all the while urging the reader to listen for traces of ancestors in one's own mind and body.

Skoog is] fashioning a poetry that fluctuates and ripples as incessantly as open water. --Boston ReviewEd Skoog is a master of mischief and misdirection. --Prairie SchoonerEd Skoog's poetry is so ambitious it takes my breath away. --The StrangerRun the red lights were the last words the musician Alex Chilton spoke to his wife on the way to the hospital. In Ed Skoog's new book the poems are running all the lights, the way that talking casually runs and flows over itself and intertwines with what others are saying. These plainspoken poems rediscover the relationship between talking and thinking, as they weave among enthusiastic jags about sex and love, theater, music, New Orleans, numbness, ghosts, wolves, history, violence, rescue, art, marriage, mothers, fathers, and children. After Katrina, I took the diet where you eat meat, and lost almost a hundred pounds from a surfeit of bacon, saut ed pork medallions, beef & lamb. The weight fell away like a knight's armor after a joust. I bought shirts at a regular store. I played softball and ran bases, bounded them, as if on a new, more forgiving planet. AndI went crazy, evened out, broke down again . . . Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas, and earned his MFA at the University of Montana. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review and Ploughshares, and earned the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award and the Washington State Book Award. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Ed Skoog is a master of mischief and misdirection... I find a unique alchemy in this book: a deep sadness combined with a broad humor, and most of all a sense that I'm being allowed to see a poet watching himself in the midst of evolving, captured in motion like a series of time-lapse photographs. --Susan Cohen, Prairie Schooner Composed during long walks throughout Washington, DC, and careful to err on the side of recklessness, Rough Day finds its essential unity in a fixation on American events and landscapes--from Yellowstone and New Orleans to Kansas and the Pacific Northwest. Throughout, Ed Skoog maintains an openness to discovery that unveils rare and prismatic views into his country. A native of Topeka, Kansas, Ed Skoog's first book of poetry, Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press), was published in 2009. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. He teaches at the University of Montana and lives in Missoula, Montana

Skoog's first full-length collection captures and presents the truth of the truth: our under-analyzed, overlooked, often fragile existences on earth.--Dave JareckiSkoog's use of language is disorientating, vivid and surprising, all the things I love about great poetry.--Nathan MooreEd 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 SherwoodThe 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 wereis 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.