Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2019. 74 pages.$16.00.
Emily Skaja’s powerful debut collection, Brute, 2018 winner of the Walt Whitman Award, reads like a memoir full of intensity and insight. In interconnected and surreal landscapes, Brute explores themes of grief, violence, and transformation with candor and nuance. Challenging traditional ideas of gender roles and sexuality, Skaja knocks over our assumptions. Her poetry contains a recognition of loss, both of innocence and of the hope that things “will fall into place.” There isn’t a safe place, she suggests, but constant vulnerability to pain and suffering. She plays with the notion that transformation is an illusion. Try as we might to transform ourselves, we are perpetually tethered to our past.
Skaja’s poems wrestle with conventional notions of female identity and repression of feeling and speech. They ask if a woman can be both object and agent; is it even possible to overcome our internalized baggage and reframe identity?
In free verse and prose poems, Skaja divides phrases in an unsettling way, such as “[In Defeat I Was Perfect]” in which the speaker tells us “I had thrown into orbit / There was a truck piled neatly with boxes / He had a splintered voice that he hid from me.” Her prose poems blur the line between conscious and unconscious experience, and Skaja uses stops instead of line breaks to create a surreal landscape of shape-shifting. In “Elegy With a Shit-Brown River Running Through It” the speaker is coming from a mythological place:
I grow true to seed.
Unfamiliar with traditions of marksmanship. Whose grouse it is. Whose grouse I am after I fall. In the hayfield I say nothing at all to the hornets.
The speaker may be a plant or animal or even a bird in a landscape that seems to be farmland. There is a fluidity in her prose poems that connects with her shaking off of conventions. All of the elements keep shifting.
Perhaps to illuminate her own story, in “Brute Strength” Skaja uses the feelings of a young girl who finds herself “trying / to cast a searchlight over swamp-woods.” In a dreamlike landscape, an assertive, fearless, child, a “witch girl,” is a leader not a follower:
. . . 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 around her like a flag?
The free-spirited and assertive child, “that witch girl / unafraid of anything . . .” is a source of power and courage for the speaker.
In contrast to the “witch girl” is the “tin girl”: vulnerable, emotional, reactive. Entwined in a dysfunctional relationship in “Dear Emily,” the speaker addresses her younger self at twenty-three:
Tin girl clutching what,
holding whatto hide your nakedness?
give her up now, that girlwho can’t be you,
who can’t be anyoneflung over his bed
like a sheet.
Deeply conflicted, the speaker recognizes the degree to which she undervalues herself and allows a partner to treat her as if she was as vulnerable and weak as a cotton sheet. Her voice carries regret, disappointment, and sadness.
Ridged and perfect,
Yawning flora,All vinegar
Hysteria & brine.
Her imagery calls to mind stereotypes of irrational women. Undermining her voice, Skaja challenges herself to move away from that younger self with her “hysteria,” and to protect herself.
These boundaries between past and present selves blur in Skaja’s poetry. Peeling back her many layers, we see an exploration of selfhood in “Elegy with Feathers”:
A man on the boat follows me all day, just one question then I’ll leave you alone. There is nowhere a girl can go that a man like this won’t have a question. A trade he feels owed.
Skaja’s poetry suggests there is a balance between being safe and being complicit and neither is an ideal scenario. It appears as if it isn’t possible to avoid these confrontations and the pain they bring. The speaker juxtaposes a tea kettle with a seagull, calling a physical transformation into being:
A teakettle boils on the wind. Help me. On my knees I ask to be turned into a gull. I shift into white gloss, feathers.
The image of the gull suggests shape shifting but not separation from the essential self. Escape is not possible, nor should it be because we would obliterate our very experiences that make us who we are. In the poem, then, the speaker’s response to objectification is to summon her imagination.
Again the balance between being safe and being complicit can be felt in “Aubade With Attention To Pathos.” The speaker feels a multitude of emotions when she learns her former lover is with another woman: “There’s regret and then there’s being so angry at myself / that I drove all night until I found the water & walked into it, March lakewater / gray stinging.” She is despondent when the one who left and the one who is left behind are both implicated in the imagery. This suggests the complex power balance of relationships—the shifting sides.
People’s lives are all interwoven and complicated in Skaja’s poems: “What is this impulse in me to worship & crucify / anyone who leaves me—” she writes. “Maybe there is no other way as we move from one to the next.” This complexity bleeds throughout her poems.
There is a constant tension between wanting to control another and wanting to be the one who is controlled, a push and pull. In “Philadelphia” we feel a hot, claustrophobic landscape in which the speaker nurses a bruise on her hand “shaped like a bird.” The bruise is both her struggle to contain her desire for control and her fear of letting go.
Just once I wanted to hit & hold the person
who could hit & hold
me down.
One of Skaja’s more poignant poems, “[For Days I Was Silent,]” recounts the aftermath of leaving an abusive relationship.
When I have lived through this——I wanted to ask——
when I am full-alive untied from him——Will I be required——To haul out into the sun & let burn dry
the blood I lost——On each of these
estrangements——Will I?
There is always a cost, the poem suggests, to being severed from a relationship, even one that was violent and mutually destructive. But, the poem asks, can the sun shine light and thus clarity on our deepest wounds and dry out the loss? There is a deep ambivalence in Skaja’s poetry about the brokenness of the relationship. The speaker holds herself accountable and yet is willing to be vulnerable to experience at the same time.
In the first poem of the book, the speaker asks, “What am I supposed to say: I’m free?” This question of agency and transformation runs through Skaja’s poems without tripping up. Heart and mind move together fluidly. Her poetry takes risks and resonates with a strange beauty.
