Staff Pick
"Everyone if we're going to talk about love please we have to talk about violence," says the speaker of one of these sharply glittering poems, and everything in Brute seems to pace and snarl around this sentiment. I picked up Skaja's debut collection for its gorgeous cover; I stayed for the thorny self-awareness and the nearly mythological treatment of the end of a relationship. The lines in this book are crunchy, splintered, and hard-hitting; the images snap and thrash. The attitude toward gendered violence in this book is markedly post-#MeToo; the speaker knows where she stands in history. But the speaker is equally unafraid of confronting her own part in the way things went down, and it's refreshing to read poems that take responsibility while refusing to take blame — what I wouldn't have given to read this book earlier in my life, when I was struggling to understand the difference between those two things. Recommended By Darla M., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
& 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.
—from “Brute Strength”
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 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.
Review
“Emily Skaja’s Brute is at once terrifying and hypnotic, strange and yet profoundly meaningful.” Crab Fat Magazine
Review
“Emily Skaja’s poetry debut, Brute, is an unflinching exploration of gender, violence, and recovery. . . . Within the pain of Skaja’s poetry is an unrelenting force, a brutish will to survive that bursts forth with every stanza, announcing her resilience.” The Paris Review Daily
Review
“Skaja’s poems are both primal scream-songs and elegies to the end of a relationship. . . . With relentless, driving energy, Skaja’s poems seek brutal truths while searching for meaningful transformation.” Booklist
About the Author
Emily Skaja was born and raised in rural Illinois. She holds an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She is the winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, an AWP Intro Journals Award, and an Academy of American Poets college prize. She lives in Memphis.