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Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, and Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Horses. His honors include a Whiting Award, Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Arts Projects, and he was the 2023–2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. More about this author >
From the publisher:
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?
In poems employing numbers significant to Diné thought and lifeway, Skeets explores the reclamation of land, imagination, and language—a world beyond environmental apocalypse, where joy is possible and where transformation is embraced over erasure. Arranged as a quartet, Horses begins with a meditation on 200 horses found dead, mired in mud that had once been a stock pond on Navajo land in Arizona. What was once a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, Skeets’s poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time and the fragile, eroding moments of the present.
