Brute Poems

Review by New York Times Review

What happens when rage and grief transform us, when our bodily fury makes us feel animal? What language do we use to howl such feral moments? These are the questions that animate Skaja's taut, ferocious debut, "Brute." These poems, centered on the long arc away from a troubling relationship threaded with violence, butt up against the question of how to represent that former, furious state. "Being the one who - being the one that- / 1 have the problem of needing to say my history teeth-first to a body / of water." The teeth-first historian can't always tell the whole tale, but she can come up with the poignant, dazzling line "How sharp it is / to be wrong-fledged." There is rueful retracing here: "Just once 1 wanted / to hit & hold the person / who could hit & hold / me down." Other places, the poems' furious compression feels carnal, and the intensity of feeling becomes almost mystic, in such lines as "A bird is a vessel, ft carries a field." In the midst of so much complication, certain poems may seem to end too easily, but others are riddled, deftly complex: "There was a bottle. / There was a bottleneck exit." This is a book about survival, and a welcome, confident debut.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]

---

Review by Booklist Review

The first line of Rules for a Body Coming Out of Water marks the emotional and psychological terrain of this award-winning debut: In a story, a girl is a tree / is a bird / is a wilderness. Exploring themes of flying and falling, freedom and entrapment, and death and resurrection, Skaja's poems are both primal scream-songs and elegies to the end of a relationship, let alone the loss of naïve selfhood. This feels like a poetics of a near-altered state, in which the reader floats in the river of the poet's thoughts, sometimes buoyed under dark skies, at other times carried in rocky rapids beneath scorching sunlight or even left bereft in murky floodwater. The poet upends logic, deposits us in foreign territory as fish out of water, flipping and flailing, gasping for air, like the speakers of the poems. With relentless, driving energy, Skaja's poems seek brutal truths while searching for meaningful transformation. The mythological allusions and imagery, the violence, the honest and painful reflections all travel toward an awakening achieved by being fully rooted in dark, human soil.--Janet St. John Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Early in this lyrical debut, winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award, the speaker notes: "In my new life whatever I claimed/ I didn't feel it was mine." Skaja's poems search for this "mine" as noun, adjective, and verb, exploring experiences of violence in an abusive relationship and their transformation into beauty. In one poem, the speaker names herself "a hairpin curve" and "cyanide stowed away in an apple seed"; in another, she reminds us that "to tell it once is not enough." As the collection unfolds, a Greek chorus of named women appear as support, highlighting the strength found in community and shared experience, as well as the viewer's tension of witnessing a relationship from the outside. In "[Remarkable the Litter of Birds]", one of the book's most moving examples of the complexity of self-making, an encounter with a member of this chorus leaves the speaker filling "my mouth with bees I tried to speak through the bees," to name love and violence together without reducing them to one or the other. Skaja's ability to hold contrasting feelings in relation yields the tenderness and triumph of this book. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---