Keynote
A frank new book about the devastation of recurring pregnancy loss, by the author of the award-winning Brute
Book Title
Black Lake
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
“Emily Skaja writes grief the way it arrives—sharp, recurring, laced with dark humor and fury. . . . Nature in Black Lake is a dynamic and parallel presence that runs through these ferociously wild and witty poems—even as they insist that we wrest and reckon with loss.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Poem Excerpt
The doctor says my labs are back, all normal—
no explanation—that it’s common
to lose a pregnancy at my age,
or in my case, more than one.
When I cry in her office
she also cries, then promises me
a baby, like a witch in a fairy tale.
I love her for that. As if one ending
can be a ward against the next.
When she takes my shoulders
in her hands & says This isn’t over
I almost believe it.
—from “Wards for October”
Body
The black lake at the center of Emily Skaja’s brilliant and startling second collection is a watery abyss of grief without bottom, threatening to drag her down into its depths. Her only escape, she believes, is to conceive and carry a child, but multiple miscarriages bring her to the brink of drowning. At the same time, the political and cultural turn of post-Roe America imperils basic human rights as essential health care for women now hangs in doubt.
Black Lake documents a desperate desire to create life despite an increasingly inhospitable and unsustainable world. Skaja’s poems are astonishing confrontations with depression, yet they are also marked by a strange and disarming humor—a wry satire of our precarious time and her own despair. This is an unflinching book, a harsh recognition that life goes on with or without the permission of the grieving self. “Who are you to say, / I lost the world?” Skaja asks. “No one. To admit / that you held the world at all?”
List Price
$17.00
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About the Author
Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography
Praise
“Emily Skaja’s Black Lake kaleidoscopes with approaches to the vernacular of a grief so profound that it requires delicious cynicism, disarming self-exposure, and Plathian acidity. Skaja shows us that poetry is as tenacious and grand as spring, yanking us once again from the underworld.”—Diane Seuss
