Horses

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”