Travelers Leaving for the City

by Ed Skoog

Overview

Travelers Leaving for the City is a long song of arrivals and departures, centered around the murder of the poet’s grandfather in 1955 in a Pittsburgh hotel, exploring how such events frame memory, history and language for those they touch. The poems probe the anonymity of cities, and the crucible of travel. The historical impact of arousal, rage, regret, and forgiveness is seen in visions of interrogations and hotels. These poems explore how family bonds, and disruptions shape, the mind and language, all the while urging the reader to listen for traces of ancestors in one’s own mind and body.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619322233
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	05/19/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas, and earned his MFA at the University of Montana. Author of four books of poetry, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and Best American Poetry, and earned the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award and the Washington State Book Award.  He is a coordinator of the Idyllwild Arts Writers Week and currently lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and son.

Read an Excerpt

CAR DOOR The self is more than running your hands through fur. Take account of the birds, the body, the sea, each departure a tedium wrapped in a promise and in that process the city where I am going will rename me, as I’ll rename the city, a city that’s easy not to see when you’re not there, easy to find when you’re by the river in winter, stepping onto the ice in service of mystery too heavy to haul home maybe because I like the world only as it is broken and frayed and the moment when I feel what may be pain, or relief from pain and is only something else a note played on a body as music may mean only music and the world only. Then say night is a broken car in the time of repair when hard looks were like a door open to the street. PITTSBURGH isn’t there anymore rode by it on the gray horse and instead a place where they go sick a place of only mist To properly understand the twelve Pittsburghs of the heart but nothing to grasp or die for and when the adults told me to cry I sang on the uneven riser which swirls like northern lights in the ear In 1955 my mother’s father, a steelworker was shot and killed in his hotel intervening in an abduction attempt the shooter “crazed and lovesick” according to his mother my mother only met her father a few times, the last time shortly before the murder, she said she took a train. In the testimony of another tenant his face, after he staggered out of the apartment, burned “an iron color.” He fell into her arms. “I was holding him, trying to help,” she said. “But he was dead.” The kidnapper escaped with his ex and they drove the outskirts of Pittsburgh Tarentum, Aspinwall, Turtle Creek all night before she talked him into turning himself in at dawn clouds are in a composition useful to fill space around the invisible in moonlight the murderer and the owl who buries and the bull who rings drove rural Allegheny County stopped at midnight for hot dogs and milk according to the transcript of the trial heard the luminous processes of the dashboard I suppose he sang like a scarf gone out long behind like magnetism like thornbushes like wind around a highway sign he went up and asked if anyone was dead again why they need to assert themselves even after we told them about sorrow think my grandfather’s ghost rode alongside them eleven miles peering in before departing who wasn’t with him the night he was killed like hearing a stranger’s headphones in the spirit of canceled flight and a storm coming she missed the beard he was growing we put our gods in clouds we hide in clouds