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. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, American Book Award, and Whiting Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at the University of Oklahoma.
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Books by Jake Skeets
“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?
This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men.
Foreword by Jake Skeets
The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant.
