Brute

Selected by Joy Harjo as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

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 on 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.

About the Author

Emily Skaja was born and raised in rural Illinois. Her first book, Brute, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Emily is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Purdue University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she was a Taft Summer Research Fellow and also earned a certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She is the Poetry Co-Editor of Southern Indiana Review. She lives in Memphis.