I seem to be doing a whole slew of events in Victoria, British Columbia later this month, in case you are around. Reading twice, and even on stage doing a podcast! Who can keep track of it all. Promoting the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), with most likely a handful of chapbooks as well. Might we see you?
.png)
(26).png)
How do we keep world-centric and human-centric without becoming cynical, exhausted, and hopeless?7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
How do we keep ourselves tender enough to rest and eat good food and laugh when the emperor is running around naked and stark?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
