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--the flooding of New Orleans and the wildfires of California--and also to the hope of rescue. Interior dramas of the self are played out in a clash of poetic traditions, exuberant imagery, and wild metaphor.

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.

. . . 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 wereis disappearing like a ship caught in polar ice.

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