Revelatory . . . By turns elegiac and erotic, the collection is also lush with language whose music evokes the landscape. This is one of the most accomplished and emotionally engaging debuts I have read, one that shows a man 'unlearns how to hold a fist' by holding another man's hand.
–New York Times Book Review We are in awe of this book . . . Knocked flat. We are humbled by the care and the candor with which is bears witness to what it means to come of age in the 'Indian Capital of the World.' The hardships, the hazards, the resilience and the refusal not to find beauty wherever it can still be found. –
2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Selection Committee, Winner Jake Skeets is a fierce observer of the world, and his poems notice what has been lost, overturning what has been corrupted or neglected . . . Line by line, Skeets assembles lives and landscape with such measured precision that the poems themselves begin to breathe. Among his most notable gifts are a lush and surprising imagery, formal dexterity, and an imagination that goes far beyond the borders of the self to extend empathy to everything it touches.
–2020 Whiting Award Selection Committee "Jake Skeets writes with such sparse yet full beauty, you sometimes don't know where the source of the power of these poems comes from. It is in the power of his language, in the craft, of course. It is in how the brutal experience of pain and loss can become a thing of beauty, which is where grace lives, which is where the best art comes from. There is so much bottle-dark beauty here. Skeets is a new, essential voice in poetry, in literature."
–Tommy Orange The poems here are as visually gripping as they are stunning to read . . . Full of landscape imagery, queer love intimacy, violence, and flowers, this is an arresting collection from a poet worth watching.
–BuzzFeed Illuminating and hauntingly incisive . . . [Skeets's collection] deserves to be seen as the debut of a brilliant and transcendent poet, whose work conveys a gorgeous sense of self and of storytelling ability–qualities of the best literature in any tradition.
–New Republic "One of my favorite new poetry books is
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets . . . His poems bring us an intimate portrait of Diné masculinity."
–Rigoberto Gonzalez, Los Angeles Times Jake Skeets's
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers shows the radical possibilities of literature and characterization, when Indigenous people are in charge of our own representation.
–Tommy Pico, Chicago Review of Books As good as any poetry debut I've ever read.
–Tommy Orange, New York Times Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers crackles with the syntax of language and landscape, love and violence. It's a stunning collection, alive and pulsing.
–Los Angeles Review of Books Jake Skeets's memorable first book . . . shows how, far more than in earlier decades, American poetry can give many of us what we need.
–Harper's Magazine Incredibly beautiful . . . Skeets's simple lines are highly impactful as they explore the complexities of love, desire and drunkenness and dirt and death.
–Electric Literature Skeets's poems capture furtive glances, queer lust, and the threads that link these various images. The book is not so much a reflection on queerness as an enactment of desire in iterative, emergent bursts.
–Poetry Foundation With deftness and awe . . . Skeets has given us a book of poems that reverberate and summon the beauty of what has been overlooked or discarded.
–High Country News Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers examines homosexuality and homosociality among Diné men in Drunktown, New Mexico, a southwestern desert town where desire and violence go hand in hand. The poems' spare verse and direct language offer no shield from the brutality and beauty of the landscape.
–Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2019 Scintillating . . . Skeets's darkly resonant debut book of poetry indulges readers in the dangerous eroticism experienced by its Diné speaker, for whom desire and violence intermingle at every turn.
–Booklist (starred review) In the unforgiving mess of life, Skeets shows us beauty.
–AZ Daily Sun Skeets's raw debut offers beautiful imagery and memorable emotional honesty . . . [this collection] 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.
–Publishers Weekly, Top 10 Poetry Pick for Fall 2019 Jake Skeets's debut collection glitters like a fistful of mineral earth. In dizzying, de-centering bursts of verse and prose, at once spare and luminous, Skeets renders tangible the experience of a young, queer member of the Diné Nation in Gallup, New Mexico.
–Samuel Partal, Community Bookstore "In
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Ná'nízhoozhí, also known as Gallup, Drunktown, and Indian Eden, staggers through memory and violent desire with 'pipelines entrench[ed] behind [its] teeth.' Jake Skeets sings this reservation bordertown into being, where the 'Navajo word for eye hardens . . . into war.' This collection is inevitable and unrelenting, its tongue 'coils on the trigger.' The future of Navajo poetry reveals itself in these pages."
–Sherwin Bitsui "On its surface,
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is an examination of toxic masculinity through the lens of a queer, indigenous Southwesterner, a book in which alcoholism, violence, and sex under cover of night are both ruefully and sensually described. But experiencing Jake Skeets's collection is more akin to listening to a musical score to, or watching the choreography of, one Diné man's vivid boyhood, the family and community of that boyhood, and the landscape holding them all. Indeed, like a lover, the land of these poems enters and ornaments Skeets's men, old and young, dead and alive. His images haunt, and his use of repetition, field, and fragment provide the book's structural genius. His is a major debut that feels to me timely and timeless–'boys only hold boys / like bottles'–and is my singular joy to introduce."
–Kathy Fagan "Jake Skeets takes us to 'The Indian Capital of the World, ' a landscape of erosion and erasure, where 'boys only hold boys / like bottles' and eros is a dangerous thing. In the brush and horseweed, ghosts and trains and abandoned trailers, a young Diné attempts to answer all the question marks of adolescence and early adulthood, desire and death commingling around him. These are poems born of unspokenness, testing the limits of language, love, and silence."
–D. A. Powell "Jake Skeets's metamorphic debut,
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, replete with poems of depth, musicality, clarity, and associative throughlines, brings its readers towards real and credible meaning. These poems insist upon harbor, limbus, nettle: as in 'American Bar, ' when we are reminded that it is 'such a terrible beauty to find ourselves beneath things.' As in 'Drunktown, ' when we are given the rupture into experience: 'In between letters are boots crushing tumbleweeds, / a tractor tire backing over a man's skull.' As in 'Let There Be Coal, ' when we begin to perceive that 'no light comes, just dust cloud, / glitterblack.' Skeets's poems deserve every celebration and rumination; this, as is his work, is irrefutable."
–Joan Naviyuk Kane Skeets's collection reclaims the voices, stories, and images of his family and people, especially American Indigenous men. These poems can be beautifully shocking or shockingly beautiful, as the speakers wrestle with queerness, intimacy, the West, and Navajo history.
–Annie Metcalf, Magers & Quinn Booksellers Reading this collection felt like sitting in a quiet, cloudy, windy field–a stilling sensation rippling through me as the world around goes on. What Skeets doesn't say in his poems is just as powerful as what he does say–I can feel the heaviness dripping off of them and visualize how they connect in this somewhat linear storytelling aspect you don't get too often with poetry collections.
Eyes Bottle Dark is sensual, sorrowful, and essential. Fans of Tommy Pico are sure to enjoy.
–Andrew King, University Book Store People are a landscape, too. We embody the places we're from. In his debut collection Skeets, a queer Diné writer, lays down the geography of a Drunktown, New Mexico. This geography charts the body of the West, full of cactus, sagebrush, even coal. And full of people also, specifically queer men. Skeets's poems draw a desire that wear its specific landscape. Want is never placeless. The men in the collection find each other among systematic and personal violence. Yet this is a loving and tender book, showing people made in the context of where they are, as much as our future take shape of where we're heading.
–Connor Oswald, Changing Hands An amazing debut collection from Diné poet Jake Skeets that explores his experience and that of Native peoples with the American Southwest. Skeets's ability to use form and innovate with structure amplify his innate talent for constructing language that is simultaneously lush and razor sharp. Grappling with alcoholism, queer sexuality, and toxic masculinity, his poems confront and challenge; but through its swirl of violence and beauty,
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is always vividly gorgeous.
–Caleb Masters, Bookmarks
