“On its surface, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is an examination of toxic masculinity through the lens of a queer, indigenous Southwesterner, a book in which alcoholism, violence, and sex under cover of night are both ruefully and sensually described. But experiencing Jake Skeets’s collection is more akin to listening to a musical score to, or watching the choreography of, one Diné man’s vivid boyhood, the family and community of that boyhood, and the landscape holding them all. Indeed, like a lover, the land of these poems enters and ornaments Skeets’s men, old and young, dead and alive. His images haunt, and his use of repetition, field, and fragment provide the book’s structural genius. His is a major debut that feels to me timely and timeless―‘boys only hold boys / like bottles’―and is my singular joy to introduce.”―Kathy Fagan
“In Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Ná’nízhoozhí, also known as Gallup, Drunktown, and Indian Eden, staggers through memory and violent desire with ‘pipelines entrench[ed] behind [its] teeth.’ Jake Skeets sings this reservation bordertown into being, where the ‘Navajo word for eye hardens . . . into war.’ This collection is inevitable and unrelenting, its tongue ‘coils on the trigger.’ The future of Navajo poetry reveals itself in these pages.”―Sherwin Bitsui