Emily Skaja

Selected by Joy Harjo as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets Emily Skaja’s debut collection is a fiery, hypnotic book that confronts the dark questions and menacing silences around gender, sexuality, and violence. Brute arises, brave and furious, from the dissolution of a relationship, showing how such endings necessitate self-discovery and reinvention. The speaker of these poems is a sorceress, a bride, a warrior, a lover, both object and agent, ricocheting among ways of knowing and being known. Each incarnation squares itself up against ideas of feminine virtue and sin, strength and vulnerability, love and rage, as it closes in on a hard-won freedom. Brute is absolutely sure of its capacity to insist not only on the truth of what it says but on the truth of its right to say it. “What am I supposed to say: I’m free?” the first poem asks. The rest of the poems emphatically discover new ways to answer. This is a timely winner of the Walt Whitman Award, and an introduction to an unforgettable voice.

Poems

Brute

taylor miles hopkins

I’m interested in dust but only new dust arriving unmarked after you leave

There can be no untwisting of the tree back into its seed.

Somewhere in here is a fish with a hook in its mouth—I’m sure of it.

comfort me, I admit. Like if a tree feels something 

when another tree is fucking up her life. I believe in patterns. Shapes.

Here I am as a hairpin curve. Here I am as cyanide stowed away in an apple seed.

Girls are taught that adage early: To permit it gives permission.

 I’ve learned to say remember like memory is not the axis on which the world shifts

the smell of cedar is home, is a ring of sky 

don’t the dead always covet something running? 

‘How to Mend a Faucet Dripping Thread’

Comma how are you. What with the leeches.

Brute quotes

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