Run the Red Lights

Ed Skoog

Run the Red Lights is the third collection from poet and teacher Ed Skoog, whose lyrics are especially transcendent in this book. These poems, written in Skoog’s first year as a parent, delve into music, memory, and a tumbling rush of delightful sound, acutely noticing what is missing or transforming: solitude, privacy, public spaces, rock music, the climate.

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ISBN: 9781556595035

Format: Paperback

Listening to Radio at Work

The paint-spattered boom box hangs by wire
beside the cabinet factory’s time clock.
Songs it plays in the morning
it plays again in the afternoon.
Hearing the same song twice
feels like a cold coming on,
an unwellness, blues or desire, not
the musical blues but the unspoken
and unwanted delicious erotic
unfuckable blues. The way
moments arrive! Storms and quakes,
for example, begin invisibly,
yet to one who is on their wavelength,
like the waves of a radio station,
change’s sad song punches
inches ahead by the breath of waves.
A puff. A haze around the invisible.
Some songs we don’t hear enough
or mishear dangerously,
our listening sore and fatal.
Perplexed on the late shift
I long to become animal
or plant matter, and if once
it was a weasel writhing
measures along the Bitterroot,
or a pond-bending flower
or photogenic red maple,
at other times a monster
or my own specter, trying to hide
the past, or my phantom
trying to reveal it.

About the Author

Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1971. He is the author of three previous books of poems, Mister Skylight, Rough Day, and Run the Red Lights. His poems have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow, a Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency Fellow, and writer-in-residence at George Washington University and the Richard Hugo House. He is a coordinator of the …

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Reviews

“Ed Skoog is a master of mischief and misdirection … I find a unique alchemy in this book: a deep sadness combined with 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.” —Prairie Schooner

“Skoog [is] fashioning a poetry that fluctuates and ripples as incessantly as open water.” —Boston Review

“Ed Skoog’s poetry is so ambitious it takes my breath away.” —The Stranger