Poets to Know - Emily Skaja

Emily Skaja is a poet from Illinois, and has won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She also has a PhD. Her book, Brute, is a nebulous but crushing examination of loss. Her pain is stark and unburied, her poetics recursivee and wrenching, and her settings and vocabulary atmospheric, like standing on the edge of the woods at sunrise. 

"Brute... is essentially one long, elegiac howl for the end of a relationship. It never lets up--this living--even when the world as we knew it is crushed." 
           --​ Joy Harjo 

Skaja's forms are eclectic, but structured, methodical. Packed with elegies, Brute draws you through a landscape of grief and healing, and through the wounds that will never heal. A death that happens every time you remember it. The ghosts still living in places that don't even exist anymore. Reading this book is like walking into the woods at night, not sure what's real and what's a dream. The pain is where you live. 

"Brute will cut right through you, cut deep, but the writing is so assured, so necessary that you will welcome the wound." 
          --​ Roxane Gay 

Full disclosure, I did consider not even including that quote because of the absence of the oxford comma. But it's too true, too appropriate. Yes, this work is painful, but it's painful in the way of pressing a bruise that's very nearly healed. It's pain as triumph, as survival. Oblique metaphor mingles with fact, the past blurs into the present, and hypotheticals splinter everything into a cracked mirror of tragedy. 

"Her non sequiturs are a gorgeous rush of metaphor--​startling, spot-on--​adding up to a new kind of clarity and gradual revelation. These poems say: It's all or nothing. Skaja goes deep to link the raw and the wounded, to spellbind and release." 
--​ Marianne Boruch 

It is like a spell, an old one with many ingredients. The cover is a huge wild dog with a small hand between its teeth, and this is overall a telling visual impression. The tension of the dog's stance, the tenuous truce between the beast and the hand's owner. Even the landscape is uneasy, waning river and small grey clouds. Be ready for both sorrow and incredible, overwhelming beauty. 

Where to start -

Read some poems on her website. And then buy Brute. You'll be glad you did. 

Emily Skaja

Elegy with Black Smoke

Three notes: long long, short--your call for me. In a prism of light I walk backward. I see a house turn into a bull turn into a house. I shake myself, wincing. I hold onto the facts. You've been dead eighteen years. The house was torn down for the cemetery. A man on the mill road stops me for my papers. I don't say I woke up in a red pond & my arms are made of magnets. Whole cities follow me south. I can't help it; I drag them behind me. When I'm not careful, worms appear on the road & I waste an entire rainstorm sobbing. I don't tell anyone the code words stuck to my coat. Without you, all the proverbs are halved in my mouth. Where there's smoke there's. Where there's smoke. 

BY EMILY SKAJA

Brute Cover