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“Beauty is possible even when it appears impossible. An astounding book.” —Joy Harjo, author of Washing My Mother's Body
Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets’s highly anticipated second collection patiently tracks the impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.
“For now, go out and dream of joy, we know the labor of feeling it.”
With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Jake Skeets emerged as a visionary new literary voice, offering readers a queer, Indigenous poetics inextricable from a connection to land. With Horses, Skeets tracks the shifting land of the Navajo Nation: What changes and what remains the same in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years?
In poems employing numbers significant to Diné thought and lifeway, Skeets explores the reclamation of land, imagination, and language—a world beyond environmental apocalypse, where joy is possible and where transformation is embraced over erasure. Arranged as a quartet, Horses begins with a meditation on two hundred horses found dead, mired in mud that had once been a stock pond on Navajo land in Arizona. What was once a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, Skeets’s poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time and the fragile, eroding moments of the present.
Fiercely observant, brilliantly constructed, and hauntingly incisive, Horses evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon.
“This alluring and exacting collection beautifully reflects on the boundaries between people and place.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A spare and powerful collection shaped by climate change, memory, and Diné cosmology.”—New Mexico Magazine
“Behind these poems is a reverberation of horse songs echoing, holding tight at the borders. Grief is a primary material, here rendered into beauty, and as you listen you will hear, feel, and know that beauty is possible even when it appears impossible. An astounding book.”—Joy Harjo, author of Washing My Mother’s Body
“With its gorgeously wrought poems that both eulogize and praise, Horses is a singularly stunning collection. Skeets is a poet singing back to the often-frightening world; how lucky we are to overhear this awestruck music.”—Ada Limón, author of Startlement
“There is so much to take notice of and be enriched by in Jake Skeets’s mesmerizing Horses. His use of language is so precise and considered it makes me feel that English can be something besides what history has made of it. Horses is a lifeline thrown ‘through an open window’ toward us. A stunning achievement.”—Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body
“Skeets’ long-awaited second collection brims with disquiet and landscapes that catalog not only what beauty survives in the Anthropocene, but also what violently departs. Language and punctuation map onto light and land: “Wind is the language of sky, heard through sentences, through tumbleweeds.” How does Skeets write about the end of the world? By tuning to the promise of the present moment and place. His music marvels, is elegiac, is hymn and howl, it frames what nature yields: “sun-grazed tar sands ant-lined deer bone or chokecherry.” His lyric lingers in my mind like the fine echo of a violin through a canyon.”—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures
“I am hunched over like a comma / studying the way a landfill / can be mistaken for a sky,” Jake Skeets writes in a collection that is part hymn, part lament. Written to sing the end of the world, instead he sees a new one: one of potential, breath, language, dreaming, ritual, making, and meaning—if, if, if he repeats throughout the volume. In these pages, the land defines its own ethic, and human capacity for destruction and delight is revealed: “Something shifts in the bushes / a rabbit an eternity a bull snake / there is a meteorite in my hand / a sparrow in yours.”—Pádraig Ó Tuama, author of Kitchen Hymns and host of Poetry Unbound