...[a] revelatory debut ... Throughout this book, Skeets challenges toxic masculinity with a queer coming-of-age narrative that’s knowingly reminiscent of D. A. Powell’s 'Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys' — but distinctly oriented within Navajo culture and the landscape of Gallup, N.M ... Masculinity leads to premature death, from violence or alcoholism ... The book’s triangulation between violence, self-destruction and desire leads Skeets to declare that 'the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.' By turns elegiac and erotic, the collection is also lush with language whose music evokes the landscape. This is one of the most accomplished and emotionally engaging debuts I have read, one that shows a man 'unlearns how to hold a fist' by holding another man’s hand.

In 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.

...Beautiful, daring ...ranges the fields, train tracks, backseats, coal yards, and watering holes of liminal border towns attuned to the particular roil of the Native American boys and young men who wander in and through them. He attends with exquisite, lyric eroticism to the ways in which their world is shaped by landscape, violence, danger, prejudice, intoxication, Diné language and culture, sexual tension, and the hauntings of a host of familial and tribal ghosts. Soma, word, and world turn into one another everywhere ... Skeets not so much populates each page with words but rather calls forth or invokes out of the field of each page what might not otherwise be seen or noticed ... A poem for a cousin, 'My Brother' ... shows this rich panoply of pantheistic forces by which manhood, personhood, can be shaped or shut down ... In yet another poem, “Naked,” Skeets writes, 'the closest men become [to being naked] is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.' And it is perhaps this wish to be naked, transparent, known, shown, revealed as true that is the simmering, about-to-blow combustion engine of these poems of becoming. Joining the most powerful male poets of Eros of our moment — Carl Phillips, Cyrus Cassells, Forrest Gander, Michael McGriff, Brian Teare — Skeets brings his considerable gifts not only to the particular terrible beauty of his native Navaho turf, but to a world in which we must all 'unlearn how to hold a fist.'

At his best, [Skeets] relies less on the shape of the page than on the sounds of words, the evocations, noun by noun, of these difficult spaces, where some of us feel at home even in distress, where many of us will never be ... These poets do not just write about a place: they tune their language to it, making its sounds and its tones reflect the feeling of living there ... Skeets, writing far from the centers of book publishing, about people with few advantages, sometimes seems to revel in the way his poems will not explain themselves to every outsider ... he has not only reflected a place but have invented sounds that fits [his] life there.

In Jake Skeets’s Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, the American Southwest’s wild and grassy terrain collides with human bodies and nonhuman objects. A strange and uncanny poetic landscape emerges ... Some of these poems scatter letters across the page, and readers will most likely find their eyes drifting, trying to make sense of what looks like the remains of something once (but no longer) whole. Skeets’s poems often force readers to become scavengers for meaning ... a reminder that Anthropocene poetry is most compelling when it acknowledges multiple Anthropocenes—indigenous, Asian, black, and others.

Unafraid in subject matter, language and breath, Skeets’ debut collection begs you to sit and look at the viscera of the West ... 'Indian Capital of the World' encapsulates Skeets’ style: Immediate, lyrical and playful ... Structurally, the visual representation of these poems is just as integral to what they accomplish at the thematic level ... Family, boyhood and queer eros are in play here. In the unforgiving mess of life, Skeets shows us beauty.

Skeets is unrelenting in his illustration of the relationship between the body and its environment ... His queering and embodiment of landscape incites the reader to realize the shifting nature of the body ... This collection’s sublime scenes reclaim visibility in varying degrees of blossom and ash; each poem swells with breath and exhaust. Skeets creates a sonic space of visceral images that smolder in the dark weight of toxic masculinity and the violence within his community. His intimate choreographies of the body, violence, and landscape strive to bridge coal and ash with glinting mirrors of compassion, masterfully traversing and affirming the chiaroscuro of community and self.

The poems in Eyes Bottle Dark reject the white background and the hollow image it presents. They pulse with beauty and blood, and their lines challenge ubiquitous colonial linguistic habits to reveal another way of creating meaning ... this collection turns the everyday acts and elements of Diné culture into the root from which its poems spring ... And the poems, they are beautiful. They embrace cracked syntax and staccato rhythm and enact imagery rather than merely representing it: the words themselves are dry tributaries, drowning lakes, weeds and flowers, shadow and light. They cascade and layer over one another to create painful, gaping omissions, white space ... we see the theme of queerness, which blossoms throughout this collection as both a wonder and a brutality ... Just as Skeets works the trap of colonial language, navigating the inherent violence of grammar in a way that might allow him to convey his experience, he navigates the minefield of sexual intimacy, in which the possibility of pain always lurks ... precisely because they perceive an entanglement between violence and pleasure, pain and exultation, the poems in Eyes Bottle Dark don’t fetishize oppression. In this way, the book orients itself toward the present and the future.

A winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Skeets’ darkly resonant debut book of poetry indulges readers in the dangerous eroticism experienced by its Dine speaker, for whom desire and violence intermingle at every turn ... Skeets’ scintillating collection joins the work of other excellent Native American writers, such as Dg Okpik, Natalie Diaz, and Sherwin Bitsui.

...[a] searing debut ... Skeets’s imagery is luminous and dark in turns, his short, heavily punctuated phrases generating a staccato rhythm ... The poet’s sexual awakening is described with a predatory tinge, as a series of brief and clandestine encounters in backseats and bushes ... Gallup’s topography of train tracks and coal mines is depicted with bleak realism through Skeets’s trademark brevity ... Skeets subtly rebukes the hypermasculinity that breeds homophobia and violence and excoriates the centuries of oppression that have caused the scourge of alcohol abuse in Native American communities ... Skeets’s raw debut offers beautiful imagery and memorable emotional honesty.