My first exposure to the work of Jake Skeets, third Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation, was the poem “Drunktown,” from his first collection Eyes Bottle Dark, in particular this stanza:
“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”
which made me wish I’d written it, except my uncle wasn’t stabbed forty-seven times behind a liquor store, and I didn’t.
I remain certain that I am not alone as a poet in envying Skeets’ mastery of visceral imagery, a gift on full display in his second volume HORSES, with its rich formations of geological and emotional strata, in which geography becomes witness to humanity’s bitter follies. Here, Skeet’s invasion of white space picks up where Eyes Bottle Dark left off and begins with the haunting image of a herd of 191 free-roaming horses found dead, thigh and neck-deep at a stock pond on the Navajo Nation, evaporated through extreme drought caused by “decades-long aggression by the United States and the changing climate”. The startling image becomes the leitmotif of the book.
In an interview with milkweed.org titled “Dear Rez Kid” Skeets states: “The beauty for me comes less from the romantic idea of horses and more from what they represent across Diné songs and stories. Navajo Horse Songs have always reminded us that horses are part of a relational world. They carry prayer, story, and even us across the emotional and physical landscape of the rez.”
But Skeets’ horses have all passed, they carry only ghosts and memories now. The natural and unnatural shifts and parries of plant and animal life, the weather itself in HORSES, speaks to the quality of being trapped in a particular moment, Skeet’s voice exists within that moment, and within the context of constant threat.
The author has reported elsewhere that he struggled with expressing queerness in this newer work because he felt he needed to write solely about climate change and its impact of the Navajo Nation but that he came to realize that he cannot separate his body from the land. It serves the reader well that he can separate neither from the page, and that he seems unable to sift the beauty out of sadness and mourning, which allows him to see the American Dream for the failed business that it has become, that it always has been.
The author has reported elsewhere that he struggled with expressing queerness in this newer work because he felt he needed to write solely about climate change and its impact of the Navajo Nation but that he came to realize that he cannot separate his body from the land.
Skeets posits that one goal of patriarchy is to separate us from our own bodies, this being so, we have Skeets to edge us back from our abyss of disconnection.
“The effort to be a writer is an act of love and an act of faith.” – James Baldwin
“The work of the writer is to broaden the theater of wonder.” – Ocean Vuong
With HORSES Jake Skeets shows up ready for the task at hand.
In “Field Song” he tells us, “I am nothing but wind” and perhaps he is accurate but his voice is “carried in light” and thereby our mutual darkness is lifted for a time.
HORSES is not a comforting book, rather it serves as a warning. A call lest we become entirely separated from our natural surroundings.
From each other.
Ourselves.
“a liberation/a possibility/held in the hand like another hand”
More than anything else Skeets is reminding us to be human.
While there is still time.
“: when above more and more narrow miracles
and answers set to stone by a single hand
as in a chorus of them
any shadow still means light”
— From ANTHROPOCENIC
Skeets is calling. We’d do well to listen.
Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, selected by the National Poetry Series and winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and an American Book Award. A Whiting Award recipient, Skeets is from the Navajo Nation and was appointed the Nation’s third Poet Laureate. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.
Publisher: Milkweed Editions (March 24, 2026)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 152 pages
ISBN: 9781639551521
Michael Blouin has been a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, the bpNichol Award, and the CBC Literary Award. He has been the recipient of the Lilian I. Found Award, the Diana Brebner Award and the Archibald Lampman Award. His novel Chase and Haven won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, an award he received again for his novel Skin House. He is an Instructor at the University of Toronto, a guest lecturer for Carleton University, and serves as an adjudicator for both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Two of his novels are now in a permanent archive on the Moon, having landed with NASA/Firefly in 2025.
