Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, a National Poetry Series-winning collection of poems. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called Cloudthroat and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.
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Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of FlowersFrom"In the Fields"
We unyoke owl pellets from marrow
in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,
a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy
dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark
beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist
with my hand.
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers:Poems -
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of FlowersFrom"American Bar"
This beer turns into another
before a fist and a fist and another fist
to the face pale & blue
they held each other the night before
before pushing away
boys only hold boys
like bottles
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers:Poems -
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of FlowersFrom"Naked"
t’óó łichíí naked or all red
hastįįh łichíi’go man naked, man all red
łichíí’go I am naked, I am all red
shida’ łichíí’go my uncle naked, my uncle all red
shínaaí łichíí’go my brother naked, my brother all red
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers:Poems
"Revelatory . . . By turns elegiac and erotic, the collection is also lush with language whose music evokes the landscape. This is one of the most accomplished and emotionally engaging debuts I have read, one that shows a man 'unlearns how to hold a fist' by holding another man's hand." —Emilia Phillips, New York Times Book Review [on Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers]
“Jake Skeets writes with such sparse yet full beauty, you sometimes don’t know where the source of the power of these poems comes from. It is in the power of his language, in the craft, of course. It is in how the brutal experience of pain and loss can become a thing of beauty, which is where grace lives, which is where the best art comes from. There is so much bottle-dark beauty here. Skeets is a new, essential voice in poetry, in literature.” —Tommy Orange [on Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers]
"Jake Skeets's memorable first book . . . shows how, far more than in earlier decades, American poetry can give many of us what we need."
—Stephanie Burt, Harper's Magazine [on Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers]
Jake Skeets is a fierce observer of the world, and his poems notice what has been lost, overturning what has been corrupted or neglected. He writes puncture-wound lines, emphatic with beauty and violence. The textures and surfaces of his world – dirt, char, sand, glass, coal, gasoline – collide with the blank space he leaves around them. Grief and rage shimmer at the edges of every line and make the white space hum. Line by line, Skeets assembles lives and landscape with such measured precision that the poems themselves begin to breathe. Among his most notable gifts are a lush and surprising imagery, formal dexterity, and an imagination that goes far beyond the borders of the self to extend empathy to everything it touches.