\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Skoog [is] fashioning a poetry that fluctuates and ripples as incessantly as open water.\" \u0026#151;\u003cI\u003eBoston Review\u003c/I\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Ed Skoog is a master of mischief and misdirection.\" \u0026#151;\u003cI\u003ePrairie Schooner\u003c/I\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Ed Skoog's poetry is so ambitious it takes my breath away.\" \u0026#151;\u003cI\u003eThe Stranger\u003c/I\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Run 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.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cI\u003eAfter Katrina, I took the diet where you eat meat,\u003cBR\u003e and lost almost a hundred pounds from a surfeit\u003cBR\u003e of bacon, saut\u0026#233;ed pork medallions, beef \u0026 lamb.\u003cBR\u003eThe weight fell away like a knight's armor\u003cBR\u003e after a joust. I bought shirts at a regular store.\u003cBR\u003eI played softball and ran bases, bounded them,\u003cBR\u003eas if on a new, more forgiving planet. And\u003cBR\u003eI went crazy, evened out, broke down again . . .\u003c/I\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cB\u003eEd Skoog\u003c/B\u003e was born in Topeka, Kansas, and earned his MFA at the University of Montana. His poetry has appeared in \u003cI\u003ePoetry, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review\u003c/I\u003e and \u003cI\u003ePloughshares\u003c/I\u003e, and earned the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award and the Washington State Book Award. He lives in Portland, Oregon.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e
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