Rough Day

Ed Skoog

“What is 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 previous book, 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 of 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.

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ISBN: 9781556594342

Format: Paperback

At times I want to walk off the set of my body break my name and burn it

first rain fell hard
now how lightly
 
like the first
silences I had any right to survive
the first joys
 
close to the highway far from the on-ramp
 
elders argue in a bus stop crèche
one says to the other
 
I will not look at you
 
I will stab your
singing throat

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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