Abigail McFee Reviews Emily Skaja's Brute

For The Rumpus, Abigail McFee reviews Emily Skaja's debut collection, Brute (Graywolf, 2019), which won the recent Walt Whitman Award. "Brute is described by prize judge Joy Harjo as 'one long, elegiac howl for the end of a relationship,'" writes McFee. More:

Skaja doesn’t shy away from danger. We don’t have to look much further than the title she has chosen in order to realize that. The word “brute” conjures violence, in the common expressions “brute force” and “brute strength,” along with what is beast-like, more animal than human. It’s a small, terse word—a word that spits from the mouth with compacted force.

Violence is central to the story Skaja is excavating. This is a collection that centers on the end of an emotionally abusive relationship. The poems confront this violence through brutal and visceral imagery: birds consumed in flame, women “stained in glass,” broken bottles, starvation of the self into bones. Yet Skaja complicates the singular narrative of woman as subject of violence, reminding the reader that her speaker is also capable of violence. In the collection’s opening poem, she writes: “When I tell my history, I can’t leave out / how I hit that man in the jaw.”

Force is important—Skaja wields hers now through words...

Read on at The Rumpus.