Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

by Jake Skeets

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 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 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.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Indigenous, Queer, Native American, Race, Fiction

82 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 10, 2019

About the author

Jake Skeets (Diné) is from the Navajo Nation. His work has appeared in Word Riot, Connotation Press, The Blueshift Journal, and elsewhere. Recently, he founded Cloudthroat, an online publication of Indigenous art and poetics.

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visceral and sparse poems, with violence between bodies and landscape, highly recommended.

Since I have a review copy I can't quote from it but pop over here to read The Body a Bottle.

Thanks to the publisher for providing access to this collection through Edelweiss.

[Paris (parisperusing) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I learned to touch a man by touching myself/ I learned to be a man by loving one." — "Dear Brother," Jake Skeets

Whew. I tear up just thinking how much more blessed this world will be with the arrival of such a voice. Never stop singing your beautiful song, Jake — because we'll never stop listening.

If you liked my review, feel free to follow me @parisperusing on Instagram.

[Minosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book absolutely devastated me in all my growing-up-native-gay-male(ish)-in-a-border-town feelings. it's heavy on juxtaposition of really neat images, of violence and landscape and beauty and sexuality all thrown stark against one another, which is absolutely my favorite poetic technique. very different style from for example Billy-Ray Belcourt's poetry which I also love, but if you are looking for that queer Indigenous sexuality and devastation vibe that Belcourt has going on, you might find something here to relate to as well.

[charlotte, · Rating 5 out of 5]

they know becoming a man
means knowing how to become charcoal

staccato of ash
holding a match to their skin

trying not to light themselves on fire

[Care · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

"Eyeteeth blossom into osprey. Our bones
dampen like snowmelt under squirrel grass.

We could be boys together finally
as milk vetch, tumbleweed, and sticker bush.

We can be beautiful again beneath
the sumac, yarrow, and bitter water."
-"In the Fields"

So close to a 5 stars! This was incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking. Sparse but haunting poems. Equal parts violence and tenderness. All within the presence of nature, a beautiful botanical worship. Queer love amongst the buffalograss. I adored so many of these poems. I felt the emotion. How beautiful to find love poems between poems about repressed masculinity and the epidemic of violence against indigenous people. He makes the darkest, most underground parts of humanity beautiful. “becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.” The soot and gasoline of the Southwest's blue collar culture meets the cholla flowers and bitterweed of Navajo lands. Jake Skeets is a name to watch for.

[aqilahreads · Rating 2 out of 5]

this is jake's debut poetry and honestly picked this up without any expectations ((also cause the cover is so appealing *_*)) however, i guess its not my kind of poetry. i really admire jake's writing though and these poems felt more experimental; not to a point where i really dislike them, they were just fine but also not to an extent that its a memorable read for me. will probably revisit and keep a lookout to more of his works!!

[Patricia Murphy]

This book is a study in concise language and image.

Some of my favorite lines:

If I stare long enough, I see my uncle in a mirror. The bottle caps we use for eyes.

You kissed a man the way I do        but with a handgun.

The Navajo word for eye hardens into the word for war.

Skin can be too loud sometimes.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the language and the sound of these poems, even when the descriptions eluded me much of the time.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poetry focusing on Native people, addiction, persecution, sexuality, and discovery.

from Dear Brother: "You kissed a man the way I do / but with a handgun. You called it; I'm the fag / we were afraid to know, the one we'd throw rocks at, huff at like horses."

from Thieving Ceremony: "You've come for me twice before. Body swollen / with booze. Fires for eyes. Each time, I let you have me / and let you cry. Let me / heal you. It is your hands / that touch me."

from American Bar: "this beer turns into another /before a fist and a fist and another fist / to the face pale & blue // they held each other the night before / before pushing away // boys only hold boys / like bottles"

[w3rmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

fresh and immersive read, the language is beautifully crafted, illuminates fascinating connections between violence and beauty, fossil fuels and nature

[Sheena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was surprisingly sad. All the poems felt oddly disjointed/fragmented, like the way life can be at times :( I also don't really read poetry so I'm not sure how to feel about it!

[anika · Rating 5 out of 5]

- Tacheeh, Siphoning, Virginity, Swallowing Kept Secrets, Buffalograss, How to Become the Moon

[Cail Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark, beautiful poems. You can smell the prairie wind in this collection. Even though Skeets isn't from Canada, this reads like something that could've been written by a kid from a Saskatchewan reserve. His use of plants and flower imagery really grabbed me.

Jake Skeets makes cool structural choices and is bold in his use of whitespace. Quite a bit of sexuality that is generally handled well. Oral sex is a go-to, referenced with the same amount of regularity as cigarettes in my own poetry.

Check out two poems here - http://www.spilledmilkmagazine.com/is.... He was interviewed on "Between the Covers", which is where I found out about him.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really moving and unique collection. It really progresses and picks up at the end. Made me want to plant a flower and cry.

[roma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned to be a man by loving one. yeahh...

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first picked this book up, I looked at the cover photo. It's entrancing, and I looked at it for a while. At first, I wondered if it was a photo of the author. I found info in the back of the book that indicates this is a Richard Avedon photo. So, okay, not a photo of the author. I looked at the author photo, and then I looked at the cover photo again, and I thought, "it's funny, the author kind of looks like the guy on the cover. I wonder if that's why they chose this image. Or maybe I'm imagining the resemblance."

I was NOT imagining the resemblance. The man on the cover was the author's maternal uncle, Benson James. The photo was taken as part of Avedon's "Drifter" series. By the time James' family learned about this photo, he had been stabbed to death. (Skeets writes about that in several of his poems.) Skeets writes about this photo in a very interesting essay published on the Milkweed webpage, but inexplicably left out of the book itself. https://milkweed.org/blog/drifting-a-... Skeets also writes about this photo, in more detail, in this essay: https://lithub.com/on-the-famous-phot...

Just as Avedon's portraits stare you right in the eye, these poems do, too. The most powerful poems were about Skeets' family, especially the first poem, Drunktown. The rest of the poems are part of Skeets' "coming out" project, about queerness, first love, and violence. I found these poems to be fussier and less accessible.

Each poem when read individually is powerful, but I found a lot of repetition in this collection, and that lessened the power.



Drunktown

Indian Eden. Open tooth. Bone bruise. This town split in two.
Clocks ring out as train horns, each hour hand drags into a screech—
iron, steel, iron. The minute hand runs its fingers
through the outcrops.

Drunktown. Drunk is the punch. Town a gasp.
In between the letters are boots crushing tumbleweeds,
a tractor tire backing over a man’s skull.

__



Men around here 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 a liquor store


__


A bar called Eddie’s sits at the end of the world. By the tracks,
drunk men get some sleep. My father’s uncle tries to get some
under a long-bed truck. The truck backs up to go home.

I arrange my father’s boarding school soap bones on white space
and call it a poem. With my father, I come up on death
staggering into the house with beer on the breath.


__


Mule deer splintered in barbed tendon. Gray highway
veins narrow—push, pull under teal and red hills.
A man is drunk-staggering into northbound lanes,
dollar bills for his index and ring fingers. Sands glitter
with broken bottles—greens, deep blues, clears, and golds.
This place is White Cone, Greasewood, Sanders,
White Water, Bread Springs, Crystal, Chinle, Nazlini,
Indian Wells, and all muddy roads lead from Gallup.
The sky places an arm on the near hills.
On the shoulder, dark gray—almost blue—bleeds

into greens

blue greens

turquoise into hazy blue

pure blue

no gray or gold

or oil black seeped through.


__


If I stare long enough, I see my uncle in a mirror. The bottle caps we use for eyes.


__


An owl has a skeleton of three letters
o twists into l

the burrowing owl burrows
under dead cactus

feathers fall on horseweed
and skull bone blown open

[Paul Manytravels · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets offers the challenges of most collections and anthologies in that they usually present some things which are good, some that aren’t, some that appealed to the reader and others that didn’t. It is a brief volume of poems by a young Native American of the Diné of Navajo, the same Diné of current US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Few Native Americans find their way into print and even fewer of those are either poets or gay. Thus, Skeets’ writes with a voice that intimately understands what it is to be marginalized, pushed aside, ignored or even hated. His collection attempts to convey some of the pain caused by that marginalization in the most emotional of all literary forms, poetry. Sometimes, he succeeds brilliantly and other times, the poetry fails in its mission.
His collection came to my attention though the podcast, “Between the Covers,” which is loosely associated with publisher Tin House Books. Tin House focuses on supporting underrepresented writers and often produces sparkling, brilliant new works that deserve top ratings and huge sales. The reason it’s important to mention that is because hearing Skeets read and talk about some of his poetry on the podcast is an impressive experience. In his reading, listeners hear and even feel his emotions, his pain and, conversely, his excitement to be sharing his work. It is what drew me into purchasing the book.
What works in Skeets’ poetry is its ability to evoke images and inspire feelings. His mother tongue is much better suited to doing this than English because the culture of that language deals in images, nature symbolism, metaphor and similes, and in supporting a culture of caring for one another, of neighbors spread across miles who still know each other well, who share even when there is nothing to share. Friends are addressed as “uncle” and close friends as “grandfather.”
Conversely, English comes from a culture where the individual is regarded more highly than the family or group and where the language primarily uses the passive voice and ‘state of being’ verbs.
Thus, Skeets had a natural leg up for writing vivid poetry.
On the other hand, cultural isolation has left Skeets forced to use images, descriptions and contexts which cannot be easily understood outside his culture.
Since the purpose of all art is to convey meaning and a message, art must rely upon references and symbols that non-artists can understand. This is even more true with poetry where the aim of the message is to evoke feelings and emotional response.
The poems of this collection that deal with situations, images and symbols too unique to Skeets’ own personal and cultural experience and culture, and cannot carry their full impact beyond a small audience. The poems within the collection that use more readily accessed symbols and images are sure to be appreciated and loved by a broader audience.
I hope people will find and listen to the podcast I mentioned because this poet deserves a good audience, but the book alone will not deliver one.

[Kelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

“the closest men become is when they are covered in blood
or nothing at all” (47)

I don’t know if I’ve read a poetry collection with a sensibility like this one.

This collection is sparse and starving, coming to cut—but, also, somehow loving in how it draws the blood, carves the bone.

I felt lulled and unsettled throughout this collection—which deftly explores not just boyhood, burgeoning sexuality, and community but plays with conceptions of time and space within the poetry, seeming to reflect Navajo perceptions of these concepts in the very formatting. This collection so expertly weaves native experiences with contemporary conversations, providing new perspectives in poetry.

More, I appreciate how this collection plays not just with language and formatting but with memory and environment, transforming the worst of our fears and realities into the most breathtaking lines, visions—transformations that linger in the mind long after your eyes have left the page.

Definitely recommend for readers who enjoy a refreshing collection of poetry whose poems sound like raindrops rippling across lake water, like cicadas reverberating in the heat~

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems that offer beauty and bruises; trains, trucks and temptations; oil, coal, ash, and fire; tractors and trains; booze and boys. A Diné boy learning to be a gay man, savoring every experience—the good, the bad, the ugly, the bumps along the way—celebrating the life he knows even when it hurts. Author’s craft-wise what stands out most is his use of white space, alliteration and metaphor.
.
My favorites are:
In the Fields (the second one named that)
Love Poem
Thieving Ceremony
Dear Brother
DL N8V 4 3SOME
Virginity
Siphoning
In the Fields (the first one named that, but really all four named that are great)
Afterparty

[Glenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Skeets’ masterful word-play and welcome the voice in these haunting poems; much of the subject-matter centers on erotic imagery. My favorite poems are “In the Fields,” “Drift(er),” and “Comma.” “The comma is a heart murmur, tremor in hamstring.”

[Jennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems make you stop

think

reflect upon the metaphors

The poetic structure also adds to weight and meaning of each poem and sometimes each word. I highly recommend checking out, or buying, a physical copy of this book, because some 0f the poems need to be seen to be understood.

[Kendrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good collection which experiments with syntax and space, but personally one which I felt lacked access points for readers who aren't rooted in American poetry and a particular regional Midwestern aesthetic.

[andré crombie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Men around here only touch when they fuck in a backseat
go for the foul with thirty seconds left
hug their sons after high school graduation
open a keg
stab my uncle forty-seven times behind a liquor store

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tenderness & violence blur in these poems. Sex and landscape, touch and fear, hurt and love. Really great book.

[Luz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional, moving, original.

[Nic · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a stunning collection of poetry. I love his use of blank space, abrupt phrases, and his fearless expression of queerness. Beautiful, violent, remarkable, it’s a collection of poems that will stick with me for a long while.

[anna ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

so good! so beautiful! beautiful images beautiful words! we are all beautiful at least once !

[Vanya Swift · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable offering.

[R.J. Sorrento · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bleak, beautiful, bloody.

[Scott Wiggerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enthralling collection of poems, which I'm about to start over and reread, as I know I missed much. But the intense eroticism and desperation are strikingly clear--and the image-driven (sometimes experimental) poems live up to the provocative title again and again. Wow! Now this is a powerful debut! If lines like "I learned to be a man by loving one" or "He bodies into me / half cosmos half coyote" get to you like they got to me, you will love this collection.