Horses

Jake Skeets, the Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation, follows his debut, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, with a second collection about a land that is changing under climate pressure. The book asks what shifts and what endures in a place that has been lived on for thousands of years. The collection opens with a single, stark image: two hundred horses found dead in Arizona, trapped in the mud of what used to be a stock pond on Navajo land. A source of water had turned into a trap for a herd already living at the edge of survival. From that scene, the poems move outward, following the body and its ties to a landscape shaped by geologic time and by the thin, eroding moments of the present. The poems are built around numbers that carry meaning in Diné thought and lifeway, and the book is arranged as a quartet. Through that structure Skeets considers the reclaiming of land, imagination and language. He imagines a world past environmental apocalypse, one where joy remains possible and where change is welcomed rather than allowed to erase what came before. Watchful and tightly constructed, Horses holds the end of one world and the first light of another in the same frame. It continues the queer, Indigenous poetics that marked Skeets's debut, with a deep bond to the land at its center.