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Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers: Poems (National Poetry Series)
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About Eyes Bottle Dark With A Mouthful Of Flowers: Poems
Product Description Named a "Best Poetry Book of 2019" by Electric Literature, Entropy Mag, and Auburn Avenue Named a "Favorite Book of 2019" by Lit Hub Named a "Best Queer Book of 2019" by BuzzFeed and Book Marks Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros. Drunktown, New Mexico, is a place where men “only touch when they fuck in a backseat.” Its landscape is scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, “the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.” But if Jake Skeets’s collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place―full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover’s body: A spine becomes a railroad. “Veins burst oil, elk black.” And “becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.” Rooted in Navajo history and thought, these poems show what has been brewing in an often forgotten part of the American literary landscape, an important language, beautiful and bone dense. Sculptural, ambitious, and defiantly vulnerable, the poems of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers are coal that remains coal, despite the forces that conspire for diamond, for electricity. Review "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." ―New York Times Book Review "We are in awe of this book . . . Knocked flat. We are humbled by the care and the candor with which is bears witness to what it means to come of age in the 'Indian Capital of the World.' The hardships, the hazards, the resilience and the refusal not to find beauty wherever it can still be found." ― 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Selection Committee, Winner "Jake Skeets is a fierce observer of the world, and his poems notice what has been lost, overturning what has been corrupted or neglected . . . 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." ―2020 Whiting Award Selection Committee “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 "The poems here are as visually gripping as they are stunning to read . . . Full of landscape imagery, queer love intimacy, violence, and flowers, this is an arresting collection from a poet worth watching." ―BuzzFeed "Illuminating and hauntingly incisive . . . [Skeets's collection] deserves to be seen as the debut of a brilliant and transcendent poet, whose work conveys a gorgeous sense of self and of storytelling ability―qualities of the best literature in any tradition." ―New Republic “On
