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 … 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”