Horses
Photo Credit: Darklistedphotography
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026
“Beauty is possible even when it appears impossible. An astounding book.”
Joy Harjo, author of Washing My Mother’s Body
“With its gorgeously wrought poems that both eulogize and praise, Horses is a singularly stunning collection. Skeets is a poet singing back to the often-frightening world; how lucky we are to overhear this awestruck music.”
Ada Límon, author of Startlement
“For now, go out and dream of joy, we know the labor of feeling it.”
With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Jake 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 remains the same in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years?
In poems employing numbers significant to Diné thought and lifeway, Skeets explores the reclamation of land, imagination, and language—a world beyond environmental apocalypse, where joy is possible and where transformation is embraced over erasure. Arranged as a quartet, Horses begins with a meditation on two hundred horses found dead, mired in mud that had once been a stock pond on Navajo land in Arizona. What was once a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, Skeets’s poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time and the fragile, eroding moments of the present.
Fiercely observant, brilliantly constructed, and hauntingly incisive, Horses evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon.
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
Photo Credit: Richard Avedon
Winner of the National Poetry Series
Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Winner of the Whiting Award
Winner of the American Book Award
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
“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 their own representation.”
Tommy Pico, author of Nature Poem, in Chicago Review of Books
“Skeets is a new, essential voice in poetry, in literature.”
Tommy Orange, author of There, There
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 violence: 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 body: 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.