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 and to the hope of rescue —from the flooding of New Orleans to the wildfires of California to the more private emergencies of domestic life. Interior dramas of the self are played out in a clash of poetic traditions, exuberant imagery, and wild metaphor. 

. . . 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, 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.

“Ed Skoog's poetry is so ambitious it takes my breath away. In it, he creates dense narratives, sees patterns, sees dissimilitudes, knows how to fishtail with images and turn with ease, knows how to braid pop culture into small personal melancholies and into large generosities.” The Stranger 

Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1971. He attended Kansas State University and the University of Montana. His poems have been published in many magazines, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and The Paris Review. He lives in Seattle and Washington, DC.

Jon Wilkins' new book of poetry, Transistor Rodeo, won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, and was published by University of Utah Press in April 2010.

Wilkins' poetry has been published in The Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Möbius, The Midday Moon, The River King Poetry Supplement, The Harvard Advocate, Georgia Poetry Review, Abbey, Chaffin Journal, and Moon Reader. When not writing poetry, Wilkins is a theoretical evolutionary biologist at the Santa Fe Institute.

"First off you need to know how much fun Jon Wilkins's Transistor Rodeo is: a whole lot, a thousand afternoons of brainy, brawling, fragrant, dazzling microscopic daisies. Very few books deliver as much electricity per line, per poem, as this one does, and fewer still can sustain that charge until, crackling, imagination flashes and gives way to beauty. Whether prayer or sonnet, parable, love song, or theorem, or frequently more than one of these, a Wilkins poem ambles and darts, hesitates, notices its surroundings, changes direction, exults, and delivers us into an entirely new place. Are we changed by reading this? I think we are. Wilkins is an alchemist. Wilkins should be your alchemist."
- Ander Monson, poet and essayist