The landscape of the Navajo Nation is in the grip of dramatic transformation. Sand dune migration has led to drought and 191 horses have been found drowned in a stock pond filled with mud.

Opening with a meditation on this loss, Horses is an electric response to crisis: a reclamation of land, imagination and language; a fierce act of protest; and a song for the beauty of nature. It evokes both the end of a world and a sense of emergence amid chaos, a new dawn flickering on the horizon.

Somewhere in a dune field

I am hunched over like a comma

studying the way a landfill

can be mistaken for a sky

'Skeets challenges toxic masculinity with a queer coming-of-age narrative that’s knowingly reminiscent of D.A. Powell’s “Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys” - but distinctly oriented within Navajo culture and the landscape of Gallup.' - The New York Times

'...the debut of a brilliant and transcendent poet, whose work conveys a gorgeous sense of self and of storytelling ability - qualities of the best literature in any tradition.’ - The New Republic

'Everything, for Skeets, becomes an image...At his best, he relies less on the shape of the page than on the sounds of words, the evocations, noun by noun, of these difficult spaces, where some of us feel at home even in distress, where many of us will never be.' -Harper's Magazine

ISBN-13: 9781836750109

Weight: 184 grams

Format: Paperback

Country of Origin: United States

Language: English

Pub Date: 02/04/2026

Page Extent: 144 Pages