Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

August 19, 2019
Winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Skeets’s searing debut is set in Gallup, N.Mex., the so-called “Indian Capital of the World,” plagued by alcoholism and violence, where the poet came of age as a young queer man. Skeets’s imagery is luminous and dark in turns, his short, heavily punctuated phrases generating a staccato rhythm (“Drunktown. Drunk is the punch. Town a gasp”). Sex and violence are intrinsically linked in Gallup, at least for men, who “only touch when they fuck in a backseat/ go for the foul with thirty seconds left/ hug their son after high school graduation/ open a keg/ stab my uncle forty-seven times behind the liquor store.” The poet’s sexual awakening is described with a predatory tinge, as a series of brief and clandestine encounters in backseats and bushes: “He bodies into me/ half cosmos, half coyote.” Gallup’s topography of train tracks and coal mines is depicted with bleak realism through Skeets’s trademark brevity: “Men/ spit/ coal/ tracks rise/ like a spine.” Skeets subtly rebukes the hypermasculinity that breeds homophobia and violence and excoriates the centuries of oppression that have caused the scourge of alcohol abuse in Native American communities (the poem “The Indian Capital of the World” enumerates a series of alcohol-related deaths drawn from Gallup newspaper headlines). Skeets’s raw debut offers beautiful imagery and memorable emotional honesty.

Starred review from September 1, 2019
A winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Skeets' darkly resonant debut book of poetry indulges readers in the dangerous eroticism experienced by its Dine speaker, for whom desire and violence intermingle at every turn: You kissed a man the way I do / but with a handgun. Throughout the book, Skeets experiments with shape and typography, with a few short poems spanning several pages, their lyrics eclipsed by white space on the page. Another poem, The Indian Capital of the World, catalogs a list of men and women killed or discovered deceased, with a man found dead in a field printed in jagged, overlapping lines. Elsewhere in the collection, two poems share the same title, In the Fields, and provide meta-commentary on the function of white space in poetry. In contrast, Skeets plays with the sonic pops of nature's colors ( a snake contorts spackled / dark puddle lilac / licked by heavy sun / off smog soot ) and the hard facts of deadly industry: We bring in the coal that dyes our hands black not like ash / but like the thing that makes a black sheep black. Skeets' scintillating collection joins the work of other excellent Native American writers, such as Dg Okpik, Natalie Diaz, and Sherwin Bitsui.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)