Emily Skaja
Photo by Kaitlyn Stoddard: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography
Bio
Emily Skaja was born and raised in rural Illinois and graduated from the MFA program at Purdue University. Her first book, BRUTE, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and will be published by Graywolf in April of 2019. Emily’s poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She is a current doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati and the Poetry Co-Editor of Southern Indiana Review. She lives in Memphis.
Writing is such a solitary pursuit, full of long silences, rejections, and crises of faith. As Auden writes, a poet often only feels like a poet at the precise moment of finishing a poem—“the moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.” An outsider would be totally justified in asking who in their right mind would go into such a field, knowing that satisfaction and triumph would be so fleeting. Doubt and anxiety may conspire to make poets miserable, but they are also the forces that motivate us to challenge ourselves to write more bravely and meaningfully than we ever would have dared if the stakes were not so high.
That lonely practice of working and dreaming and reading and reworking, that cultivated solitude, that changing your mind about yourself and your book a hundred times over, that silence, is perhaps why it feels so shocking and rewarding suddenly to find yourself lifted up, praised, and encouraged by other writers. The best part of my life as a writer has been the opportunity to belong to a community of people who I admire and who have written books that changed my life, excavating me with wonder and mystery and humor from the mire of my own unhappiness and doubt. That is why this grant is such a wonderful gift—it’s a tremendous vote of confidence from other writers that gives me faith in myself and in my work. I take the responsibility of this gift seriously, and I hope to give back to the community that believed in me this much. I am so grateful—thank you.
"[Eurydice]"
Eurydice the tree is full of cicadas I hear them building their city of wet glass
hissing at night when the tree moves like hair when thousands of their bodies
pulse in the low-lit humid air pink in the streetlight when the first drops hit
& the line of rain follows like a wall of birds, walls off the whole bird-heavy sky.
There comes a point when you have to hold the man responsible for what he did.
I have decided it’s degrading to say I let him. I say my name into the open cellar
covering my eyes. I will lead myself out of it. A tree falls over my door but I don’t
touch it. I never could convince myself that the shell of those insects is only a shell.
After nine days of rain I don’t walk alone in the fields I don’t pick up the phone
when he calls me. How will I know myself? Hell-bitten—shade? He says I love only you
& every time a woman I know disappears down the long hallway of a bar with him I do not
say to her Couldn’t you trust me that if the man could stand to be loved I would have done it?
Come out into the new wet earth pull the leaves away from your skin Eurydice.
Ivy on the linden tree. River of pale trash rolling down Asher hill. Gutter flood.
I’m here in the hail-trampled yard. Bright landscape—our flecked debris. It’s ending
Eurydice. So I stand in my coat. We’re almost a whole shadow now from far away.