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Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets’s highly anticipated second collection patiently tracks the impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.
With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Skeets emerged as a visionary new literary voice, offering readers a queer, Indigenous poetics inextricable from a connection to land. With Horses, Skeets tracks the shifting land of the Navajo Nation—what changes, and what stays the same, in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years?
Arranged as a quartet, this collection begins with a meditation on apocalypse. In 2018, nearly two hundred feral horses were found mired in mud that had once been a stock pond near Northern Arizona—a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time in order to situate the fragile, eroding moment of the present. “Dust storms lope at the sprig / and spur of low hills,” he writes, witnessing the formation and destruction of the land as it changes alongside the creatures who depend on one another for stability and sustenance: hummingbirds, horse grass, humans.
In poems composed using numbers important to Diné thought and lifeway, Horses evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon—hope, complicated and held close.
