Black Lake: Poems - Paperback

by Emily Skaja (Author)

A frank new book about the devastation of recurring pregnancy loss, by the author of the award-winning Brute

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?"

Author Biography

Emily Skaja is the author of Brute, which was selected by Joy Harjo as the winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. She lives in Tennessee and teaches at the University of Memphis.