Horses: Poems

by Jake Skeets

Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets’s highly anticipated second collection patiently tracks the impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.

With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Skeets emerged as a visionary new literary voice, offering readers a queer, Indigenous poetics inextricable from a connection to land. With Horses, Skeets tracks the shifting land of the Navajo Nation—what changes, and what stays the same, in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years?

Arranged as a quartet, this collection begins with a meditation on apocalypse. In 2018, nearly two hundred feral horses were found mired in mud that had once been a stock pond near Northern Arizona—a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time in order to situate the fragile, eroding moment of the present. “Dust storms lope at the sprig / and spur of low hills,” he writes, witnessing the formation and destruction of the land as it changes alongside the creatures who depend on one another for stability and hummingbirds, horse grass, humans.

In poems composed using numbers important to Diné thought and lifeway, Horses evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon—hope, complicated and held close.

Genres: Poetry, Indigenous, Nonfiction

152 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2026

About the author

Jake Skeets (Diné) is from the Navajo Nation. His work has appeared in Word Riot, Connotation Press, The Blueshift Journal, and elsewhere. Recently, he founded Cloudthroat, an online publication of Indigenous art and poetics.

Reviews

[abi keber · Rating 5 out of 5]

We might be so back

I love literature!! I love words!! I love poetry that is just slightly over my head but makes me feeeeeeel things

I haven’t touched a book in months (thanks, school). Picked this up bc the cover was pretty and I needed a quick win and then it reminded me that I am alive and life is beautiful

Putting this next Open Throat on the ‘books I will read this one million times’ shelf

[Aarik Danielsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Skeets is our modern king. A new Mary Oliver from the Navajo Nation. No one writes nature and weather and what they mean like him.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Primarily focused on nature and the land, Skeets constructs such evocative and compelling imagery in his poems-- you can see the light, feel the wind, and breathe the air in his writing. Much of Horses is a response to how climate change has effected -- and many ways devastated -- the desert ecology within Navajo Nation. Woven into the collection are moments of eros and yearning that tie into the nature around our own nature of want for connection.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

I so very much enjoyed this second collection by this author! Its gorgeous music, incantatory; how visually and sonically vivid it is, and how it builds on itself, slowly, poem by poem, refrain by refrain, and all of it without me understanding much of anything in terms of references, a story, or whatever else might be meant by understanding (anyway, for that the notes are a good place to start). Horses' poetry spreads and connects intuitively. Its speaker builds a land and its language—sings it into being, and following this singing, frankly, is way enough for me.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets’s second collection deals with climate change's effect on the land and the people and animals that inhabit it. Skeets has a great ear and plays with the language in ways that compound his meanings. Highly recommended.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

All of the poems definitely went over my head. I really liked reading the authors note at the end though, which gave this collection a lot of context.

[Frances S Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two hundred horses found dead in what used to be a stock pond. The water dried up. The mud held them. That is where this book starts, and I hate it and it makes me sad.

I do not read much poetry. When I do, it has to crack something open or I lose interest quickly. This one did. It opened something in me about land and loss, and about what we are doing to both.
The Navajo Nation has been here for thousands of years. What is happening to it now, the drought, the drying, the slow erasure of what once sustained life, is not abstract. It is horses in mud. It is people watching the landscape that holds their history shift faster than language can keep up.
What stayed with me is that this is not a hopeless book. It is a grieving book that insists on joy anyway. It's a book that costs something to feel in the middle of everything that is being lost. That line stayed with me: we know the labor of feeling it.

I thought about water after I finished it. Where mine comes from. How little I think about it. How easily I turn a handle and expect it to be safe, clean, guaranteed. We have made water something we buy, package, and sell, as if it were optional, as if access to it were not foundational to life. There is something unsettling about the distance between that reality and another where people, horses, whole ecosystems are left to go dry.

That is exactly what a book is supposed to do.

[Sierra · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, I want to thank Milkweed for an advanced readers copy of this collection.

I’d do a 3.5 if possible.

I must say - I highly recommend reading some of the notes first! I went back and re-read many poems after learning more about them, which really increased my understanding of the poems.

Overall, some of these were hard for me to grasp - some of the poems are the types of poems that make poetry feel out of reach… meaning they went over my head. (Sounds like a me problem, not a Jake Skeets problem). I do want to mention that I did dog ear a few poems that I did find to be impactful for even my poetry challenged self. Those include: Ghost Lake, After Dark, A Walk in Tsaile, Soft Thunder, America, Surface Mapping, and Field Song.

[Dol Leander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recieved as an ARC from the publisher. Opening with the death of almost 200 horses, this collection doesn’t pull any punches. Skeets explores the beauty of living in the Navajo Nation without ignoring the grief. The tragedy is even made an active participant in the pleasures that are still found. He finds a way to reflect these things in the layout of the text and use of punctuation as well, demonstrating an impressive understanding of poetry both as a visual and oral tradition. Everything is purposeful and heartfelt. An important read for everyone, these poems are a striking meditation on the end of the world as we know it and the creation of a new one in the process.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading HORSES by Jake Skeets! I was immediately eager to read this poetry collection when I saw it was blurbed by one of my fave poets Billy-Ray Belcourt. He described this book as a stunning achievement and I agree. I loved how these poems related to the land which was evident from the dedication at the beginning: “for the land”. I really enjoyed the intentional forms of these poems including a found poem, a sestina and the deliberate use of blank space like in the poem Ghost Lake. So many of my fave lines included repetitive sounds like in this line: “deer deep in the sleep of my chest”. Two of my fave poems in this collection are On Rain or Light or Joy which also features repetition and Daybreak which introduced me to Diné words and starts with beautiful descriptive nature imagery. I loved one of the closing lines “I am nothing but wind.” which reinforces that connection to the land. I really appreciated the author’s notes at the end that provided insightful context to these poems. I’ve been loving reading more poetry this year and this is one of my fave collections of 2026!

Thank you to Milkweed Editions and McClelland & Stewart via NetGalley for my gifted review copies!

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

The end of the world can take forever. Water versus sand, wind versus smoke, everything is on fire but we remember water. This is very observational, and much at the end of things remains as it was, or leaves the traces of the world we lost. Cole Arthur Riley writes “"It can feel foolish to pause to marvel at the stars when the world is burning. Or to find the world beautiful when you've known it to betray you. But wonder is a liberation practice. A reminder that we contain more than tragedy. Beauty is our origin and our anchor."
Horses is a lament, and hope still lives in lamentation.

[Andrea (Hammock and Read) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Y’all this is going to be a favorite. I’m going to need the physical copy of this as well but the audio read by the author with Diné throughout is perfectly done! It uses numbers important to the Navajo - the theme of horses that died within a stock pond that then starts the poems of climate change and land. Skeet’s way with land, weather, the nature of Navajo Nation you can feel deep with these. I highly recommend this book to everyone, even non-poetry readers.

[cc · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am bent like a waterbird
studying the way the moon
can be mistaken for a hole in the sky
-- "If Crane"

somewhere in a dune field
I am hunched over like a comma
studying the way a landfill
can be mistaken for a sky
-- "If Collapse"

I wish I liked Skeets's work more than I do, but it often comes off as so academic and fixated on being Important (and reminding you that these are Very Important Ideas) that I'm numb to much of it.

[Laura Daniels · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was Maggie Queeney's poetry book club selection for May. A second poetry collection from a young, wonderful poet from the Navajo Nation.

field, light, water, morning, time and wind, per the poet, make up the words that are used the most throughout the collection - and are the end words for Field Song - a sestina.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt myself yearning for a complete sentence and then exhaling when they arrived. This really, really worked in some places and sent me skimming in others. I will say there are some absolute banger one-liners in here and absolutely gorgeous imagery about the natural world.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing makes me happier than a new collection of poetry that blows my mind. READ THE NOTES SECTION of this collection.

Really takes his work to another level here. These poems are loved and crafted with care.

[Julia McCall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Felt every word

[Raino Isto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somber and heartfelt considerations of nature and identity. Really good rhythm. My favorite line: “For now, go out and dream of joy, we know the labor of feeling it”

[Vic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nebulous

[Miguel Vega · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I happen across / a dead crow a dead horse / and still deer soften."

If this doesn't win a Pulitzer.

[Mary Pomeroy · Rating 4 out of 5]

actually beautiful lyric poetry. would recommend reading the notes in the back before reading the book :(

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are challenging to read-- they aren't straightforward. But the author's notes at the end helped provide a lot of context.

I'm interested in how climate change is portrayed in fiction so it makes sense it should be a theme in poetry as well.