In Jake Skeets’s poetry collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, he intertwines the rugged landscapes of the American Southwest with human bodies and various objects. Through his verses, a peculiar and eerie poetic land is revealed, where a lifeless cactus shelters a burrowing owl, and where wild roses and sego lilies guide us to the sound of a noisy truck radio. Hailing from Vanderwagen, New Mexico, as a Diné poet, Skeets’ poems delve into the organic surroundings of Dinétah, the Navajo homeland, while also exploring the presence of industrial elements such as bottles, coal, truck frames, and hubcaps.
In his poem “Maar,” Skeets paints a picture of larkspur, beeplant, and blue flax leading to dome-shaped ruins reminiscent of nuclear testing sites. He portrays a haunting image of a “numb star” hovering on the horizon like a “burning bomb quiet as stone.” Skeets subtly references the tragic history of Native American workers exposed to radiation from uranium mines on Navajo land during the Cold War era when he describes the “burning bomb” as “quiet as stone,” evoking the unsettling remnants of the abandoned uranium mines that still scar the land today.
Apart from environmental devastation, Eyes Bottle Dark delves into themes of childhood trauma and hidden queer desires. Skeets recurrently mentions a dark incident in a swimming pool and follows two boys as they navigate the challenges of forbidden queer affections. In the poem “How to Become the Moon,” he juxtaposes dark imagery with sensuality and suffering, encapsulating a poignant moment of intimacy and fear: “as you go down on him. He sees a boy, afraid of the deep end, / drowning in the swimming pool of your throat.” The intertwining of pleasure and pain in their relationship is palpable in lines like “to metal teeth / carburetor muscle beneath combustion” and “My tongue runs across his shoulders, stone bells affixed to bone.” Skeets portrays queer love as a clandestine act fraught with obstacles, symbolized by the interruption of light, be it a sunset or headlights.
Through imagery like “hands petal on the shore,” Skeets encapsulates the sense of vulnerability and fear that the characters face, from the threat of a distant light to the specter of a brushfire. The recurring motif of “brushfire” in Eyes Bottle Dark echoes themes of burning, decay, and ash, symbolizing the ruins left behind, akin to the depleted uranium mines on Navajo land. The blend of human limbs, xylem, phloem, and sap in the poem “Táchééh” creates a hallucinatory portrait of intertwined bodies navigating various threats, from societal scrutiny to environmental degradation.
In his poetry, Skeets not only explores printed text but also the significance of white space within a poem. The emptiness on the page symbolizes more than just absence; it reflects the echoes of ancestral pain and trauma, such as his father’s experiences in boarding schools designed for Native American assimilation. Some of Skeets’ poems, like those titled “In the Fields,” scatter letters across the page, prompting readers to piece together fragments of meaning, akin to scavengers sifting through remnants. His work challenges readers to engage actively with the text and extract deeper significances, as seen in “Drunktown,” where he reduces the symbolic owl to its skeletal letters.
For enthusiasts of boundary-pushing poetry like Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem and Jeffrey Angles’ translation of Hiromi Itō’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Jake Skeets’s Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers serves as a poignant reminder that Anthropocene poetry is most potent when it acknowledges diverse perspectives, from indigenous to Asian, Black, and beyond.
