![]() ![]() The bottle caps we use for eyes.Įyes 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. If I stare long enough, I see my uncle in a mirror. On the shoulder, dark gray-almost blue-bleeds Indian Wells, and all muddy roads lead from Gallup. White Water, Bread Springs, Crystal, Chinle, Nazlini, This place is White Cone, Greasewood, Sanders, With broken bottles-greens, deep blues, clears, and golds. Veins narrow-push, pull under teal and red hills.Ī man is drunk-staggering into northbound lanes,ĭollar bills for his index and ring fingers. Staggering into the house with beer on the breath. I arrange my father’s boarding school soap bones on white spaceĪnd call it a poem. Stab my uncle forty-seven times behind a liquor storeĪ bar called Eddie’s sits at the end of the world. Hug their son after high school graduation Men around here only touch when they fuck in a backseat In between the letters are boots crushing tumbleweeds,Ī tractor tire backing over a man’s skull. The minute hand runs its fingersĭrunktown. This town split in two.Ĭlocks ring out as train horns, each hour hand drags into a screech. I found these poems to be fussier and less accessible.Įach poem when read individually is powerful, but I found a lot of repetition in this collection, and that lessened the power. The rest of the poems are part of Skeets' "coming out" project, about queerness, first love, and violence. The most powerful poems were about Skeets' family, especially the first poem, Drunktown. Just as Avedon's portraits stare you right in the eye, these poems do, too. Skeets also writes about this photo, in more detail, in this essay. (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. By the time James' family learned about this photo, he had been stabbed to death. The photo was taken as part of Avedon's "Drifter" series. The man on the cover was the author's maternal uncle, Benson James. I wonder if that's why they chose this image. 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 found info in the back of the book that indicates this is a Richard Avedon photo. At first, I wondered if it was a photo of the author. It's entrancing, and I looked at it for a while. When I first picked this book up, I looked at the cover photo. 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. “Veins burst oil, elk black.” And “becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.” And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover’s body: A spine becomes a railroad. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. In this place, “the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.”īut 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. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. 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. ![]()
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