{"product_id":"horses","title":"Horses: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eLonglisted in the 2026 National Book Awards\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNavajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets's highly anticipated second collection patiently tracks the impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"For now, go out and dream of joy, we know the labor of feeling it.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith \u003ci\u003eEyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers\u003c\/i\u003e, Jake Skeets emerged as a visionary new literary voice, offering readers a queer, Indigenous poetics inextricable from a connection to land. With \u003ci\u003eHorses\u003c\/i\u003e, 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?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 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, \u003ci\u003eHorses\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFiercely observant, brilliantly constructed, and hauntingly incisive, \u003ci\u003eHorses\u003c\/i\u003e evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJake Skeets\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eEyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers\u003c\/i\u003e, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, and Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and \u003ci\u003eHorses\u003c\/i\u003e, which was named one of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026. His honors include a Whiting Award, Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, NEA Grant for Arts Projects, and he was the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is currently serving as the third Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eReview Quotes\u003c\/strong\u003e:\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"This alluring and exacting collection beautifully reflects on the boundaries between people and place.\"\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Like Skeets himself, this collection is a spectrum of many flavors, meanings, genders, and loves. Not strictly this or that, but as with all poetry, meanings within meanings, words revealing and hiding sentiments and senses at the same time.\"\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"A spare and powerful collection shaped by climate change, memory, and Diné cosmology.\"\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eNew Mexico Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Behind these poems is a reverberation of horse songs echoing, holding tight at the borders. Grief is a primary material, here rendered into beauty, and as you listen you will hear, feel, and know that beauty is possible even when it appears impossible. An astounding book.\"\u003cb\u003e--Joy Harjo, author of \u003ci\u003eWashing My Mother's Body\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"With its gorgeously wrought poems that both eulogize and praise, \u003ci\u003eHorses\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"\u003cb\u003e--Ada Limón, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eStartlement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"There is so much to take notice of and be enriched by in Jake Skeets's mesmerizing \u003ci\u003eHorses\u003c\/i\u003e. His use of language is so precise and considered it makes me feel that English can be something besides what history has made of it. \u003ci\u003eHorses\u003c\/i\u003e is a lifeline thrown 'through an open window' toward us. A stunning achievement.\"\u003cb\u003e--Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of \u003ci\u003eA History of My Brief Body\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Skeets' long-awaited second collection brims with disquiet and landscapes that catalog not only what beauty survives in the Anthropocene, but also what violently departs. Language and punctuation map onto light and land: \"Wind is the language of sky, heard through sentences, through tumbleweeds.\" How does Skeets write about the end of the world? By tuning to the promise of the present moment and place. His music marvels, is elegiac, is hymn and howl, it frames what nature yields: \"sun-grazed tar sands ant-lined deer bone or chokecherry.\" His lyric lingers in my mind like the fine echo of a violin through a canyon.\"\u003cb\u003e--Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of \u003ci\u003eRoot Fractures\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"I am hunched over like a comma \/ studying the way a landfill \/ can be mistaken for a sky,\" Jake Skeets writes in a collection that is part hymn, part lament. Written to sing the end of the world, instead he sees a new one: one of potential, breath, language, dreaming, ritual, making, and meaning--\u003ci\u003eif, if, if\u003c\/i\u003e he repeats throughout the volume. In these pages, the land defines its own ethic, and human capacity for destruction and delight is revealed: \"Something shifts in the bushes \/ a rabbit an eternity a bull snake \/ there is a meteorite in my hand \/ a sparrow in yours.\"\u003cb\u003e--Pádraig Ó Tuama, author of \u003ci\u003eKitchen Hymns\u003c\/i\u003e and host of \u003ci\u003ePoetry Unbound\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Milkweed Editions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54627961831734,"sku":"9781639551521","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0745\/2301\/7526\/files\/imageloader_a4477f4f-78ff-4955-ae59-cdc8daf16215.jpg?v=1790110296","url":"https:\/\/www.summerbeambooks.com\/products\/horses","provider":"Summer Beam Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}