RaveThe New RepublicIn Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Skeets’s illuminating and hauntingly incisive debut poetry collection, Gallup is a place of wonder and discovery, challenging settler ideas of it. It is also a place of reckoning, as the book explores and prods Western norms—such as the gender binary or the commodification of nature—that have so often run up against the cultures of Indigenous people ... The experiences and resulting feelings Skeets shares about his time in Gallup can feel disarmingly universal ... For all its beguiling lyricism, this is a work determined to point out the contrast-filled moments that define Skeets’s life experience, many of them brought on by a colonizing force that sits on the outskirts of the work, lurking always but never explicitly present in body ... The shadowy brand of violence evoked in Eyes Bottle Dark is at once mundane and shocking ... The New Native Renaissance, as Julian Brave Noisecat called it in The Paris Review, does not exist because the publishing industry magically decided overnight that Native authors ought to be read; it emerged because the quality of these writers’ work demanded nothing short of a nationwide audience ... To read Skeets as a part of this movement is not entirely wrong: The work that appears in Eyes Bottle Dark deserves in some sense to be viewed as the newest addition to a movement to lift up Native voices. But it also deserves to be seen as the debut of a brilliant and transcendent poet, whose work conveys a gorgeous sense of self and of storytelling ability—qualities of the best literature in any tradition.
