Jake Skeets, Horses

 

PART THREE          MEMORIAL

I trace the outline
of horses encased
in hydrated lime
            an offering
to return home
to loam to ground water 

the horses buried
on-site to free up
the creeks and crease of their pasts
their makeup all song
and morning and mane 

here, enshrined
with the memory
of a stock pond
horses buried
thigh-deep in mud
clawing for the first world
for something we left behind

The second full-length collection by Oklahoma-based poet Jake Skeets, a member of the Navajo Nation (and the third appointed as the Nation’s Poet Laureate) is the brilliantly and heartbreakingly devastating collection Horses (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions/Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2026), a title that follows his full-length debut, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019). As the notes at the back of the collection provide:

In 2018, approximately 191 horses were found dead at a stock pond on the Navajo Nation. The horses were identified as feral horses, wild horses, or free-roaming horses. Stock ponds are used as water stations for roaming livestock in what has been called an arid landscape. The stock pond where the horses were found was near Gray Mountain in Northern Arizona. It had been dry because of the extreme drought the Navajo Nation is facing, caused by decades-long aggression by the United States and the changing climate. The horses were found thigh- and neck-deep in the mud, some horses on top of other horses.

These animals were searching for water to stay alive. In the process, they unfortunately burrowed themselves into the mud and couldn’t escape because they were so weak.
 – Former Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez

The horses were found in a circle, mud caked in their coats. Some horses were found upright as if running. The Navajo Nation, as a response sprayed the horses with hydrated lime to speed up decomposition and buried the horses on-site. Today, the feral horse problem is contributing to the drought conditions of the Navajo Nation.

One horse survived and her name is Grace.

Set with opening lyric, Horses is constructed as a book-length suite in four sections—“HORSES,” “HOOTSO,” “ENTANGLEMENTS 1” and “AND STILL DEER SOFTEN”—writing a collection a dream-land of decolonial meditations on apocalypse through fences and boundaries, pipelines and blockades and dried-up lakebeds, all of which lead back to the book’s foundation: of dead wild horses and climate crises. “there [            ] a long garden,” he writes, mid-way through the collection, “lush / locked, an oasis there / and we [         ] our torsos / touching in the tickseed // never touching though / a wildfire burns along the highway / in our memory of each other / you come closer to the asphalt [.]” Acknowledging a loss amid losses, his is a lyric composed across a hush; composed amid moments held in space. Skeets’ lines are remarkably pointed, composing Horses as a kind of essay-poem around a devastated landscape, writing both a love song to the land and its inhabitants as well as offering warning, elegy and witness. “When we get to the dead horses,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of “FIELD SONG,” “I suppose the wind / is felt, deep blue within the silt of it—when we get to the field, / I close my shutter left open.”

There’s a heft to this collection, writing the legacy of dead horses “mired in mud” seeking water, a narrative encapsulation and elegy around landscape and loss, colonial and climate impact. “In the beginning, breath—erosive slather of wind and vein. / Waters saint the church caught at the throat, / callus, calcium, a bitter tide. The first body bent / into locust into tower : a mountain physics, an early river.” There’s such a sense of the physical landscape articulated through these pages, writing a perspective and a space even through citing their slow erosion. Or, as he writes:

there was a lake here you say
I repeat there was a lake here
as if to at least see my voice touch yours
and you trace my lip with your [                       ] 

there [                                       ] a lake here
and just because there isn’t anymore
doesn’t we mean we don’t feel
the water echo beneath us

Camilla Gibb, I Used to Be a Pisces

 

Organ Meat

I spent years with a therapist
who encouraged me to unravel
the ways in which my mother
had failed us. 

I was resistant

preferring to listen to a butcher
who kept steering me
towards better cuts of meat. 

Only once I was led toward the organs
did I realize I was eating
my own tongue.

Curious to see a debut poetry title from Toronto writer Camilla Gibb, I Used to Be a Pisces (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2026). For those unaware, Gibb is an award winning and bestselling prose author, having published five novels and a memoir, a position not always followed by an announcement into a poetry debut (or at least, not one usually followed by such a compelling debut). The poems of I Used to Be a Pisces, collected with accompanying collage-works by the author, are intimate and sharp, taking narrative twists, overlays and turns; they begin, offering a series of openings and suggestions of where each might travel, allowing the reader their own scope and agency to enter. “The disappointment of a peach,” begins the short “Fruit, End of Season,” “chalk fibres at summer’s end // the chemical of love / dying beyond its season [.]” Interestingly, one might see connections, echoes of tone and tenor, between these poems and certain works by Canadian poets Alice Burdick [see my review of her latest here], Jaime Forsythe and Lillian Nećakov (another poet who works with visual collage) [see my review of my latest here], all of whom are known, through varying degrees, for pushing their lyric up against (and through) a boundary of surrealism. “We watched a red setter carrying rocks into waves / and forgot about my broken sandal.” begins the short descriptive lyric of “Ashore,” “We were young then, holding hearts, / hands, on a cusp of faraway ocean // convinced of the earth’s beauty, / our own, the shore // my mouth open like an oyster / to taste the pearl on your tongue.”

Set in the table of contents as untitled clusters (over more overt sections), Gibb’s lyric narratives push against that surreal edge, one pushed further through her use of collaged image, although one less overt than holding a sense just out of focus; a narrative clarity that occasionally drifts into elements of dream: both tangible and intangible. There’s an intimacy to these pieces, one that focuses on detail, and the possibility of how the form of poetry might provide that attention. “You have missed the garden,” writes the poem “Between Seasons,” “I have missed you.” One might wonder what Gibb considered possible through the poem that her prose might not have allowed, or if this collection is simply the result of writing that occurred across the length and the breadth of her writing life.

Ongoing notes: early April, 2026 (poetry month!): Andy Butter + Maria Cyranowicz (trans. Malgorzata Myk,

Another VERSeFest, come and gone. But most of our sixteenth annual festival was livestreamed, so if you missed any of it, be sure to catch either via our website or through our YouTube channel, yes? And now it is poetry month! Be aware that we’re posting a daily poem (at 3pm, Ottawa time) once more across Aprilvia the Chaudiere Books blog. Who might be first? Who might be next? And I’m reading later this month in Victoria, British Columbia, by the way, through Planet Earth Poetry, as well as hosting a podcast (recorded, on stage) while I’m around. Are you around?

Brooklyn NY: I’m just now working through American writer and editor Andy Butter’s debut chapbook, To Circumambulate A Sacred Lake (Brooklyn NY: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2025), a curious and extended chapbook-length lyric meditation. Butter has a good sense of the extended lyric, the long line, stretching out as far as possible across multiple pages, which almost makes me wonder if this poem is (or will be, or can be) far more than what is presented here, within the boundaries of this particular chapbook-sized unit. If Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” was attending the space of that landscape, so too, Butter’s poem, providing a similar shape through articulating an outline, slow and careful and almost delicate. As the poem, subtitled “[Allowing the materials their errors]” begins: “Here is where I start after ending. We walked, turned and touched. / Here we held and the trees of paradise lurched.”

We ran around Lake Superior—the center of the universe.

 

Our footprints a pearl-string of pressurized gravity wells.

 

We ran through rain, through broad open glades,

nights we knew the moon was near.

Rising as incense in a cathedral, slow and sluggish,

our voices tittered like old monks. In minutiae, in daily minuets,

 

within minutes skin sloughing and the egress of love,

we slept beneath the shroud of mosquitoes a buzz thin as muslin.

Poland/Texas: It is curious to see more work from Polish poet, literary critic and performer Maria Cyranowicz, translated into English from the Polish by translator Malgorzata Myk, as the chapbook a species of least concern (El Paso TX: Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024), as generously passed along from the translator (and through Polish poet, translator and critic Kacper Bartczak, recently in town for VERSeFest). The poems hold themselves as accumulations of long thought-lines, set as one foot following another, into a depth or a darkness or a particle of light. “and then I understood,” begins the poem “funeral,” “I am Alexander and he is Fanny / it’s me who is following still following the absent father / I keep saying damn it or much worse / smiling through my teeth to those stroking my [.]” As part of a folio of eight Polish poets at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics from 2024, Cyranowicz writes: “To me, language is a social construct inside of which the speaker of my poetry is bound to be trapped and to which they are frequently subjected. Linguistic conditioning, which entails the socialization of individuals to such ‘delusions’ as religion, education, politics, or even literature, does not proceed without oppression.”

the forty third sunset
watched by the Little Prince 

 

when I open my eyes the sun is still shining,
a small rusty orb close to the evening;
I’m turning it in my thoughts like a hot potato,
it’s setting too fast beyond the thin line of eyelids. 

the horizon fills with blood. I can’t not look.
I touch it with my eyes: it’s pulsing. I smile a little.
I’m trying hard to feel less sad.
I’m rubbing eyelids with my fingers and I don’t feel
reluctance in me, only astonishment.
there’s something beyond this line. there’s something in this color.

Sandra Simonds, Burning Oracle

 

Inside Cassandra,
      the book burned,
   her body flooded, burned.
Fires in July, floods in August,
drowned by October. A deer
                found the ashes
      in the river and laughed, ate
            them raw. The stag
      was hit by a car, and it snowed
  for the first time in Florida
      in two-hundred years.
     The people called it a strange
          white rain. It was a dream
      where I wrote my life
         story in the language
             of cirrus clouds, the sky
         cleared, could not be retold
in any ordinary sense of the word tale. (“I )”)

The latest from American poet and critic Sandra Simonds is Burning Oracle (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), following a cluster of chapbooks—including her Canadian debut, Combustible Mood (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]—and eight full-length titles including steal it back (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) [see my review of such here]. The poems of Burning Oracle are composed as A kind of call-and-response, interspersing four numbered sections amid long, languid stretches of lyric thread—“On Reynard,” “On Cassandra,” “The Unknown Woman of the Seine,” “On Francisco Goya” and “On Paul Celan.”

Composed in the shadow of generational trauma via the Holocaust, family story and literature, Simonds articulates deep and dark book-length poem populated by figures that thread and weave through, into and around each other. “The clouds / have become / broomsticks / and upside- / down seahorses.” she writes, early on in the sequence. Hers is an endlessly articulate Cassandra, weaving through Paul Celan and Francisco Goya; weaving through devastation and trauma, old boyfriends and grief, European travel and the ghosts of allegory, empire, prophets and war. “Francisco considers / the difference / between melancholy / and sadness.” she writes, two-thirds through the collection. “John keats / suffered from melancholia, / which is a condition / that becomes apparent / when you’re too small / and don’t fit in.” She manages such particular, extended lyrics; how her array of sentences and phrases pile atop each other to form narratives that ebb and flow; line breaks of a thousand cuts, a spool of endless, articulate witness.