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. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781555978358 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Graywolf Press Publication Date: 04-02-2019 Pages: 72 Product Dimensions: 6.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)About the Author Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the creative writing MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt CHAPTER 1 I: MY HISTORY AS You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down? — ANNE CARSON MY HISTORY AS In my history, I was bones eating paper or I was paper eating bones. Semantics. I lived in a narrow house; I lived with a man who said You fucked up your own life, who said I could never love someone so heavy. The place was brick on brick with iron grates covering the windows — rowhouse cage, South Philly. I was learning how some of us are made to be carrion birds & some of us are made to be circled. Somewhere in this education I stopped eating. Held up my hands to see if my bones would glow in the dark. My boat name could have been HMS Floating, Though Barely. Meanwhile I had a passion for cartography. Not leaving, just coloring the maps. I covered all the walls with white paint, whiter paint, spiraling out — a weather system curling over water. I always drew the compass rose flat. I was metal-blue, I was running my mouth like a bathtub tap. A bone picked clean of particulates. Everything has some particular science. By its nature, a vulture can't be a common field crow, for instance. Look at the wings, look at that hard mouth, look at the feet. When I tell my history, I can't leave out how I hit that man in the jaw, that I wasn't good at mercy, that eating nothing but white pills & white air made me unchartable — I can't skip to the end just to say well it was fragile & I smashed it & everything's over, well now I know things that make me unlikely. What am I supposed to say: I'm free? I learned to counter like a torn edge frayed from the damp. That's how I left it. Leaving the river, leaving wet tracks arrowed in the brush. BRUTE STRENGTH Soldier for a lost cause, brute, mute woman written out of my own story, I've been trying to cast a searchlight over swamp-woods & parasitic ash back to my beginning, that girlhood — kite-wisp clouded by gun salutes & blackbirds tearing out from under the hickories all those fine August mornings so temporary so gold-ringed by heat haze & where is that witch girl unafraid of anything, flea-spangled little yard rat, runt of no litter, queen, girl who wouldn't let a boy hit her, girl refusing to be It in tag, pulling that fox hide heavy around her like a flag? Let me look at her. Tell her on my honor, I will set the wedding dress on fire when I'm good & ready or she can bury me in it. IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP WHITE MOTHS from flying out of my mouth. I am 25. I paint the door blue. I go in when he tells me to stay out. Next to a billboard in Philadelphia that says Your Message Here, I am sewn into a dress. On Broad Street, ravens lurk on the Divine Lorraine Hotel as if to say Always a corpse flower, never a bride. Facing south, I can make myself apologize for anything. My voice is thick — a shroud of bells. But will I listen. What I hear in the dark is my own blood stalking me like a drunk boy wild on cheap gin swinging his hammer to nail a tree swallow flat to a barn door. A bird is a vessel. It carries a field. There are nights when I sleep on the couch & lift macramé lace to my cheek from a hope chest. Outside, a teenager shoots a teenager shoots a teenager. The cops come to measure the street. They ask me What did you see? I saw a hole in the whole of the picture. When he comes home late from his fight at the bar, I hold a cold rag steady to his knuckles. I think I can love someone who cares enough to bruise for me. He touches his thumb to the corner of my mouth, pulls back my lip to consider my teeth. I HAVE READ THE WHOLE MOON In March I drop an egg hoping a bird will fly out disbelieving science. All the manuals tell me this is a logical contract. You commit yourself to a shell & you end up flying. Fine. Stone after stone, I'm defacing the river of being in love with you. True, I don't care how that sounds. I have a list of cocoons to transform my body: Uncontrollable Shaking. Sleep Paralysis. Dread of Eating. I'm guilty of pretending the roads to your house are no longer roads but deerpaths angled crooked through the marsh. Again the water doesn't stop; it rains even when the weather is overdue: a holy parallel. My mouth is rotted & anonymous. The bed needs oars. I'm interested in dust but only new dust arriving unmarked after you leave. After you leave, you leave & thicketed in sludge I've been glued open. Self as spectacle: Yolk Marvel. Unbird. Emily as grave pillar as salt lick as dammed up luminous in thread. I have read the whole moon cycle; it doesn't explain the cracks. Mercury for once cannot be blamed. My dishes float in soap like little planets. I drop my hands in the sink. They come up feathered. ELEGY WITHOUT A SINGLE TREE I CAN SAVE I've been standing all night in the woods near Necedah with your name etched in red on my tongue like a box-elder wing. Loss of life occurred at a specific hour, a certain day, we are told. No one was with you — how that weighs on me. That there can be no untwisting of the tree back into its seed. Innocent of all charges. Granted just one reprieve. Has there ever been anyone more false than I am, pretending I know which one is a white pine against white stars? Shouldn't I remember which of these is the tree you climbed, which of these you were too afraid to come down from? I think you were the first person to say Cassiopeia to me. As young as we were, we could not carry a ladder out here by ourselves. Alone, I watch the water move now like a clock someone is winding with a knife. I am starved for that easy taxonomy of Things Before. For the years not likely to be cut open with scissors only to find proof of disease. Black hair spooling from the lungs of each month since. You're gone & I collect fox fur by myself in every direction. You're gone & I misname the trees. IN MARCH WHEN YOU TELL ME YOU DON'T I walk in a straight line as a compass pulled the wrong way north. High Priestess of the Not-Quite. Chief Dolorous. And fuck it all — All of it. Unobserved, clement. Being the one who — being the one that — I have the problem of needing to say my history teeth-first to a body of water — to the river, to the gutter, to the storm drain red & rushed with leaves in dirty water on the way to your apartment maybe I should give up the story that what I say can change it notwithstanding one for, one against your cowardice notwithstanding halfwinter light torn up wet-white & eyeless & I know I should sky up birdward — I know I should circle high until my arms are kited cramped but can I see you plainly or at all from any height do I know how to see you I do but I don't & I can't find you on a March night moonless on the hill where I know you are out walking the treeline slowly with your dog. Tell me if I can make the not-moon intercede — If I can come south as a figure wearing starlings as a coat If I can be If I can be If I can be a tunnel either leafing or branching or — — If I can be If I can be If I can be [IN DEFEAT I WAS PERFECT] In defeat I was perfect the luster & the grime on me irresistible Bright landscape with the sky blacked out A spectacle I was tied into the clothesline drunk In my defense every arrogant green thing had been blooming against my directive I remember the light was pressing me down toward myself the trees were thick with insects dark birds shadowed the street I had been circling hungry red & narrow not slogging through the mud like the Magellan of any promised thing He was leaving in arrows he walked out in a boldfaced lie I said You need to consider me Consider all that considering the future I had thrown into orbit There was a truck piled neatly with boxes He had a splintered voice that he hid from me Is it giving up if you give what you have & the universe still fucks you Now I can't picture his face anymore only leaves I remember I was desperate to speak to expose the right language Understand he kept driving back to me & back to me He said I didn't always love you He said I didn't want to tell you to wait for me (But wait for me) ELEGY WITH A SHIT-BROWN RIVER RUNNING THROUGH IT Never have I ever let anyone skin me alive for my secrets. I grow true to seed. Unfamiliar with traditions of marksmanship. Whose grouse it is. Whose grouse I am after I fall. In this hayfield I say nothing at all to the hornets. I admire their mud huts. I think only in lists. Th
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