Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers: Poems

Jake Skeets
Adult Nonfiction - 811.6 Ske

Jake Skeets’s collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, [but] it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place―full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover’s body: A spine becomes a railroad. “Veins burst oil, elk black.” And “becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.” Rooted in Navajo history and thought, these poems show what has been brewing in an often forgotten part of the American literary landscape, an important language, beautiful and bone dense.


Nonfiction by Native American Authors

  • Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku


  • Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations


  • Black Elk Speaks


  • The Turquoise Ledge


  • Heart Berries


  • Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West


  • Crazy Brave: A Memoir


  • Lakota Woman


  • Dreaming in Indian: Contemporary Native American Voices


  • Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses


  • Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance


  • Our Stories Remember: American Indian History, Culture, and Values through Storytelling


  • American Indian Stories


  • As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock


  • When My Brother Was an Aztec


  • Abandon Me: Memoirs


  • The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present


  • The Broken Cord


  • Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories, and Recipes from the Upper Midwest


  • Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers: Poems


  • The Right to be Cold: One Woman's Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change


  • #NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women


  • God is Red: A Native View of Religion


  • The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings


  • Men We Reaped: A Memoir


  • Whereas


  • Nature Poem


  • The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America


  • My Body is a Book of Rules


  • The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America


  • The Way to Rainy Mountain