Poetry

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

Poems
Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award

“Skeets is a new, essential voice in poetry, in literature.” —TOMMY ORANGE
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Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Winner of a Whiting Award in Poetry
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry

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.

ISBN
9781571315205
Publish Date
Pages
96
Dimensions
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.75 in
Weight
6.3 oz
Author

Jake Skeets

Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Waters Edge. Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico, he holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Praise and Prizes

  • “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
  • “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
  • “We are in awe of this book … Knocked flat. We are humbled by the care and the candor with which it 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)
  • “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
  • “One of my favorite new poetry books is Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets… . His poems bring us an intimate portrait of Diné masculinity.”

    Rigoberto Gonzalez
    Los Angeles Times
  • “Jake Skeets’s memorable first book … shows how, far more than in earlier decades, American poetry can give many of us what we need.”

    Harper’s Magazine
  • “Jake Skeets’s Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers shows the radical possibilities of literature and characterization, when Indigenous people are in charge of our own representation.”

    Tommy Pico
    Chicago Review of Books
  • “Incredibly beautiful … Skeets’s simple lines are highly impactful as they explore the complexities of love, desire and drunkenness and dirt and death.”

    Electric Literature
  • “Skeets’s poems capture furtive glances, queer lust, and the threads that link these various images. The book is not so much a reflection on queerness as an enactment of desire in iterative, emergent bursts.”

    Poetry Foundation
  • “Joining the most powerful male poets of Eros of our moment—Carl Phillips, Cyrus Cassells, Forrest Gander, Michael McGriff, Brian Teare—Skeets brings his considerable gifts not only to the particular terrible beauty of his native Navajo turf, but to a world in which we must all ‘unlearn how to hold a fist.’”

    On the Seawall
  • Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers examines homosexuality and homosociality among Diné men in Drunktown, New Mexico, a southwestern desert town where desire and violence go hand in hand. The poems’ spare verse and direct language offer no shield from the brutality and beauty of the landscape.”

    Literary Hub
    Most Anticipated Books of 2019
  • “Scintillating … Skeets’s darkly resonant debut book of poetry indulges readers in the dangerous eroticism experienced by its Diné speaker, for whom desire and violence intermingle at every turn.”

    Booklist (starred review)
  • “Skeets’s raw debut offers beautiful imagery and memorable emotional honesty … [this collection] subtly rebukes the hypermasculinity that breeds homophobia and violence and excoriates the centuries of oppression that have caused the scourge of alcohol abuse in Native American communities.”

    Publishers Weekly
    Top Ten Poetry Pick for Fall 2019
  • “In Jake Skeets’s Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, the American Southwest’s wild and grassy terrain collides with human bodies and nonhuman objects. A strange and uncanny poetic landscape emerges, one in which a dead cactus conceals a burrowing owl, where wild rose and sego lily lead us to a noisy truck radio. A Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico, Skeets writes poems that deal both with the organic terrain of Dinétah (Navajo homeland) and the industrial objects within it: bottles, coal, truck frames, hubcaps.”

    Harvard Review
  • “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
    author of There There
  • “Skeets atomizes written language into its raw materials, the very shapes of the marks on the page, and then reassembles them into a liminal space where he wrenches Diné identity, masculinity, queerness, and the legacy of colonialism against each other … Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers reminds us why poetry is a medium separate from prose, research, and journalism. Through language’s deconstruction, perhaps we may reveal what it was designed to hide.”

    Tinderbox Poetry Journal
  • “In Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Ná’nízhoozhí, also known as Gallup, Drunktown, and Indian Eden, staggers through memory and violent desire with ‘pipelines entrench[ed] behind [its] teeth.’ Jake Skeets sings this reservation bordertown into being, where the ‘Navajo word for eye hardens … into war.’ This collection is inevitable and unrelenting, its tongue ‘coils on the trigger.’ The future of Navajo poetry reveals itself in these pages.”

    Sherwin Bitsui
  • “On its surface, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is an examination of toxic masculinity through the lens of a queer, indigenous Southwesterner, a book in which alcoholism, violence, and sex under cover of night are both ruefully and sensually described. But experiencing Jake Skeets’s collection is more akin to listening to a musical score to, or watching the choreography of, one Diné man’s vivid boyhood, the family and community of that boyhood, and the landscape holding them all. Indeed, like a lover, the land of these poems enters and ornaments Skeets’s men, old and young, dead and alive. His images haunt, and his use of repetition, field, and fragment provide the book’s structural genius. His is a major debut that feels to me timely and timeless—‘boys only hold boys / like bottles’—and is my singular joy to introduce.”

    Kathy Fagan
  • “Jake Skeets takes us to ‘The Indian Capital of the World,’ a landscape of erosion and erasure, where ‘boys only hold boys / like bottles’ and eros is a dangerous thing. In the brush and horseweed, ghosts and trains and abandoned trailers, a young Diné attempts to answer all the question marks of adolescence and early adulthood, desire and death commingling around him. These are poems born of unspokenness, testing the limits of language, love, and silence.”

    D. A. Powell
  • “Jake Skeets’s metamorphic debut, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, replete with poems of depth, musicality, clarity, and associative throughlines, brings its reader towards real and credible meaning. These poems insist upon harbor, limbus, nettle: as in ‘American Bar,’ when we are reminded that it is ‘such a terrible beauty to find outselves beneath things.’ As in ‘Drunktown,’ when we are given the rupture into experience: ‘In between letters are boots crushing tumbleweeds, / a tractor tire backing over a man’s skull.’ As in ‘Let There Be Coal,’ when we begin to perceive that ‘no light comes, just dust cloud, / glitterblack.’ Skeets’s poems deserve every celebration and rumination; this, as is his work, is irrefutable.”

    Joan Naviyuk Kane
  • “Jake Skeets’s Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is marked by a sublime and mournful rupturing. The collection interrogates masculinity; positions queerness amid the ricegrass, snakeweed, and sandbur; and establishes an indelible lexicon with dynamic turns of phrase like ‘my pelvis daises as he chants my body back to weeds’ … The book blooms beautiful, ‘glitterblack,’ both ossuary and lifeblood.”

    Wendy C. Ortiz
    Alta