Book description
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…
Why read it?
1 author picked Brute as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
In her stunning poetry collection, Brute, Emily Skaja navigates the dark corridors of trauma at the end of an abusive relationship. Exploring the intersections of both love and violence, these poems have a mythic quality to them, with the narrator seemingly struggling to survive the brutality of a fairy tale world longing to gobble her up. At the same time, the fantastical elements of these poems are balanced by the present moment, with cell phones, social media, and other current technologies evoking a kind of modern magic that holds sway over our lives. The poems in this collection take…
From Andrea's list on The best fantastical and frightening books about women reclaiming their own power.
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December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
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