Horses

Skeets (Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers), a Diné poet, traces changes in the landscape of Navajo Nation in these haunting poems. Taking its title from the 2018 discovery of 191 dead horses trapped in the mud of a dry stock pond in the Nation, the collection draws connections between the land and its inhabitants to demonstrate human and nonhuman entanglements. In many poems, Skeets calls attention to a shared experience between the people and the environment, both suffering from the threats of climate change: “there has been no rain and we monster/ hot afternoons in narrow hollows/ metals green and sweep over memories of dew/ and shorelines now rust and golden with sweat.” Skeets employs a first-person plural we throughout, drawing the reader’s attention to a collective perspective of critical resistance to state-sanctioned violence and erasure: “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.” In these poems, queer desire also exists alongside the natural world: “I learn to love him/ so erosive it eats/ through the canyon.” This alluring and exacting collection beautifully reflects on the boundaries between people and place. (Mar.)