Rough Day

Title Page Note to the Reader Dedication Epigraph Table of Contents What's in these books that have come to me A mile outside of Yellowstone What is silence for Rage: after the funeral Our bare brief jeweled guitar You might have to What my mother loves is solitaire Light chores between first and second sleep Ice recoils tonight from marshes Meanwhile I am preparing Some parts of speech are harder to draw One time I fell down got cut At times I want to walk off the set of my body break my name and burn it Midnight radio from Astoria plays funk. Let me try this clumsy again at dawnThe historical marker is a form of guilt The condo held the rock star's body like a puppet I haven't ruined my body yet with joy Whatever I have been doing all my life I am doing now I'll try to stop singing When word comes the emperor of the world has died No longer a kid I have come to the grave You were beside me at the start of this On river road the moon suspends When I land and get in the taxi Outside my apartment Affixed to upper balconies of the World Bank I'm in Washington and Like a die that is only real every sixth throw. Grizzled countenance of morningI am a child of ghosts His grin's upside-down police cruiser Each friendly encounter is a basement I write her name on every napkin Money is a bandage where above the oak My mother is a ferocity on the Hilton Hotel roof By now the hospital has unfolded I am an event in my sudden willed loner's mute drama Last light of summer glints off the motorcade The stoned guy from the first floor How we tear the billboard down is how we tear the house down John Donne was dean of St. Paul's I hear that people are dying in America with the very. It is the reverse of everythingA dying man is almost grown After the matinee I feel acutely My name's in the forest From inside the secondhand store I admire In the industrial kitchen I take red debris from the dish In salmon silence of nineteen Cottonwoods parse their shadows along the river The grill is wrapped tight against the autumn sprinkler Above the canal tonight by the willow overhang These on the other hand are orderly The old man we pick up in Browning It was my blanket first and she took it A train runs late through my arms Ospreys nest their rising dollars upright. At the western outfitters the clerkAbout the Author Books by Ed Skoog Links Acknowledgments Copyright Special Thanks. "Ed Skoog is a master of mischief and misdirection...I find a unique alchemy in this 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 landscapesfrom 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 What's in these books that have come to me? Ed Skoog asks in Rough Day. He then rephrases the book's central question: What is in this body that has come to me? Skoog's debut volume, Mister Skylight, looked back in shock and anger at Hurricane Katrina-Rough Day looks forward at-how to rebuild and restore a sense of identity and memory after great rupture, and how to prepare for the next undoing. Skoog finds in Zugunruhe-the restless behavior or animals prior to migration - a model for imagination's waves of creation and destruction, a metaphor for poetry as a propulsive behavior that keeps the mind on the move. I haven't ruined my body yet with joy, though I worry it like a carpenter working on a building for ghost, safety of range comfort in revenge I once found them at the edge of song, fleeing the fire the cold either, I would give a full accounting of time but cannot remember it, and anyway that world has passed us Book jacket

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