Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

Jake Skeets

Description

Winner of the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

Winner of a 2020 Whiting Award in Poetry

Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry

Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros.

Drunktown, New Mexico, is a place where men “only touch when they fuck in a backseat.” Its landscape is scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, “the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.”

But if Jake Skeets’s collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place—full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover’s body: A spine becomes a railroad. “Veins burst oil, elk black.” And “becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.” Rooted in Navajo history and thought, these poems show what has been brewing in an often forgotten part of the American literary landscape, an important language, beautiful and bone dense.

Sculptural, ambitious, and defiantly vulnerable, the poems of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers are coal that remains coal, despite the forces that conspire for diamond, for electricity.

Additional recognition: 

Named a “Best Poetry Book of 2019” by Electric Literature, Entropy Mag, and Auburn Avenue

Named a “Favorite Book of 2019” by Lit Hub

Named a “Best Queer Book of 2019” by BuzzFeed and Book Marks

Sujets

• indigenous
• Themes
• Subjects
• Native American
• contemporary
• LGBTQ+
• América
• 21st century
• Dine
• Native Americans
• New Mexico
• Poetry
• Places
• Erotica
• American
• Love
• Nouveau-Mexique

Informations

• Publié par: Milkweed Editions
• Date de parution: 10 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781571319920
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five collections of poetry annually through five participating publishers. The Series is funded annually by Amazon Literary Partnership, the Gettinger Family Foundation, Bruce Gibney, HarperCollins Publishers, Stephen King, Lannan Foundation, Newman s Own Foundation, Anna and Olafur Olafsson, Penguin Random House, the Poetry Foundation, Elise and Steven Trulaske, and the National Poetry Series Board of Directors.
2018 COMPETITION WINNERS
Valuing by Christopher Kondrich of University Park, MD Chosen by Jericho Brown for University of Georgia Press
Nervous System by Rosalie Moffett of Athens, GA Chosen by Monica Youn for Ecco
Fear of Description by Daniel Poppick of New York, NY Chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy for Penguin Books
It s Not Magic by Jon Sands of New York, NY Chosen by Richard Blanco for Beacon Press
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets of Vanderwagen, NM Chosen by Kathy Fagan for Milkweed Editions
EYES BOTTLE DARK with a MOUTHFUL of FLOWERS
EYES BOTTLE DARK with a MOUTHFUL of FLOWERS
poems by
JAKE SKEETS
MILKWEED EDITIONS
2019, Text by Matthew Jake Skeets
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
[phone]
milkweed.org
Published 2019 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in Canada
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover photograph by Richard Avedon,
The Richard Avedon Foundation
19 20 21 22 23 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Ballard Spahr Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Skeets, Jake, author.
Title: Eyes bottle dark with a mouthful of flowers : poems / Jake Skeets.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019001875 (print) | LCCN 2019003038 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571319920 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315205 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Navajo Indians--Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3619.K46 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.K46 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.6-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001875
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
For my family, the strongest people I know
CONTENTS
Drunktown
Afterparty
In the Fields
Truck Effigy
T cheeh
Let There Be Coal
Siphoning
Gasoline Ceremony
Virginity
Maar
Swallowing Kept Secrets
Dust Storm
DL N8V 4 3SOME
Dear Brother
Child Born of Water
Thieving Ceremony
Buffalograss
How to Become the Moon
Love Poem
In the Fields
Naked
Comma
Drift(er)
In the Fields
The Body a Bottle
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
Glory
Sleepers
A List of Celebrities Who ve Stayed at the El Rancho Hotel
The Indian Capital of the World
American Bar
Red Running Into Water
Love Letter to a Dead Body
In the Fields
Notes
Acknowledgments
Kood H zh Doolee
From here, there will be beauty again
EYES BOTTLE DARK with a MOUTHFUL of FLOWERS