Red Sky Blues, Ed Tato

Edition of 50 copies,

hardback, hand dyed sectional cover, 36 pg, RRP $65.00

Kilmog Press

 Ed Tato has studied with Wystan Curnow and Michele Leggott, read weekly at Auckland's Poetry Live, and won the 2007 Montana Poetry Slam. He's the author of True Stories from la Cosa Nostra (Unholy Day Press) and poems not pieces (Spartan Press – 2011). His poems can be found in print and web journals such as Trout and nthposition. A former warehouse worker, hotel bellman, furniture mover, escort driver, and city planner, Tato returned to the US to earn a Master in Fine Arts from Syracuse University and lives there still, looking for work.

 Plain-spoken and clipped, red sky blues springs from human vulnerability and exposes us to emotions as volatile and relentless as the weather phenomena forecast by each title. Scenes evoke a shadowy quotidian tenuously accountable to direct experience – characters endure, remote and estranged. The music is direct, spare and mournful. Its flattened lyrics moan from fields, highways, bathrooms and ruined gardens, not in praise or transcendence, but for a momentary spell of shelter and mercy from the inexorable squall of life beyond our control.

 Red Sky Blues is available at Parsons Bookshope in Auckland or at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Gift Shop here: http://artgallery.marketeer.co.nz/product.pasp?categoryid=1&productid=140