The landscape of the Navajo Nation is undergoing dramatic changes. In 2018, 191 wild horses were discovered dead in a stock pond near Gray Mountain. The horses were trapped thigh- and neck-deep in the mud, some piled on top of others. Horses is a twelve-part poem responding to the climate crisis faced by this region and beyond.

This is the story we tell when seasons change

but what we are told of time: time is an ulcer

a lie we tell through mouths not our own

because this mouth belongs to policy

because time is stolen from us.

Horses is about the end of the world, but it might also be about emergence, caught somewhere at the horizon, like the morning, all blue and crisp.

Critically acclaimed Dine poet Jake Skeets' collection discusses the devastating impact of global warming, industrialisation and US aggression.

About the Author

Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers, and winner of the National Poetry Series, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, American Book Award and Whiting Award. His writing has appeared in Poetry Foundation, The New York Times Magazine and The Paris Review.

Skeets is the recipient of an NEA Grant and a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship. He is Dine, from the Navajo Nation, and is currently serving as the 3rd Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, 2025-2027.

Reviews

'Skeets challenges toxic masculinity with a queer coming-of-age narrative that's knowingly reminiscent of D.A. Powell's "Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys" - but distinctly oriented within Navajo culture and the landscape of Gallup.'

'...the debut of a brilliant and transcendent poet, whose work conveys a gorgeous sense of self and of storytelling ability - qualities of the best literature in any tradition.'

'Everything, for Skeets, becomes an image...At his best, he relies less on the shape of the page than on the sounds of words, the evocations, noun by noun, of these difficult spaces, where some of us feel at home even in distress, where many of us will never be.'

'Skeets is a new, essential voice in poetry, in literature.'

-- Tommy Orange



Book Information
ISBN 9781836750109
Author Jake Skeets
Format Paperback
Page Count 144
Imprint Akoya Publishing
Publisher Akoya Publishing