Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets's highly anticipated second collection patiently tracks the impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.
With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, 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 stays the same, in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years?
Arranged as a quartet, this collection begins with a meditation on apocalypse. In 2018, nearly two hundred feral horses were found mired in mud that had once been a stock pond near Northern Arizona-a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time in order to situate the fragile, eroding moment of the present. "Dust storms lope at the sprig / and spur of low hills," he writes, witnessing the formation and destruction of the land as it changes alongside the creatures who depend on one another for stability and sustenance: hummingbirds, horse grass, humans.
In poems composed using numbers important to Diné thought and lifeway, Horses evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon-hope, complicated and held close. 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.
