Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
In Drift(er), Jake Skeets addresses the Richard Avedon photo that adorns the book’s cover: “to drift is to be carried by a current of air or water / but men are not the teeth / of their verbs.” Here and elsewhere in this collection, Skeets plays with whitespace, dancing across the page and crossing the spine as if it were a trespassing. Some of the poems end abruptly, mid phrase, like a signal cutting out. As in the title, the bodies of men interweave with fields and tracks and beer, and desire and loss chase each other through the pages.