{"product_id":"eyes-bottle-dark-with-a-mouthful-of-flowers-poems-by-jake-skeets","title":"Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers: Poems by Jake Skeets","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"container container--50 u-separator-bottom\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"container__content u-separator-right\"\u003e\n\u003csection class=\"post-text\"\u003e\n\u003csection\u003e\n\u003cdiv itemprop=\"description\"\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"a-expander-content a-expander-partial-collapse-content a-expander-content-expanded\" aria-expanded=\"true\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWinner of the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"a-expander-content a-expander-partial-collapse-content a-expander-content-expanded\" aria-expanded=\"true\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWinner of a 2020 Whiting Award in Poetry\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"a-expander-content a-expander-partial-collapse-content a-expander-content-expanded\" aria-expanded=\"true\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFinalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"a-expander-content a-expander-partial-collapse-content a-expander-content-expanded\" aria-expanded=\"true\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSelected 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. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"a-expander-content a-expander-partial-collapse-content a-expander-content-expanded\" aria-expanded=\"true\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDrunktown, 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNavajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMen 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.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"a-expander-content a-expander-partial-collapse-content a-expander-content-expanded\" aria-expanded=\"true\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBut 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnd 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"a-expander-content a-expander-partial-collapse-content a-expander-content-expanded\" aria-expanded=\"true\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePaperback \/ 96 pages\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/section\u003e\n\u003c\/section\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"The Bookish Type","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53516807012733,"sku":null,"price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0264\/0891\/0933\/files\/9781571315205.jpg?v=1729595713","url":"https:\/\/thebookishtype.pro\/products\/eyes-bottle-dark-with-a-mouthful-of-flowers-poems-by-jake-skeets","provider":"The Bookish Type","version":"1.0","type":"link"}