Rose Beardmore

Literary Publishing
March 26th 2023
Brute: The Ever-Shifting Listener

Emily Skaja’s poetry collection Brute is equal parts autopsy and birth certificate— a dual

elegy for a past relationship and aubade for a brand new self. With a gruesome attention to detail

and praises from renowned poets Joy Harjo and Roxane Gay, Skaja dissects the grief she

experiences during and post-breakup. The relationship she describes is not one worth saving;

even from a pre-breakup perspective, Skaja seems acutely aware of the power imbalance and

disrespect between her and her ex-partner. In the opening piece, My History As, Skaja writes “I

was learning / how some of us are made to be carrion birds / & some of us are made to be

circled.” These animalistic metaphors persist throughout the collection— Skaja builds a world

for us which is equally as savage and graphic as it is nostalgic and welcoming. She leads us into

our backyards, the woods behind our houses, and far deeper. Brute introduces us to the natural

world as a cruel place, but one that is familiar, where we can have faith that each separate

element of the storied memory balances and finds peace by the end of the tale.

Divided into four parts, the collection seems heavily influenced by a line in Sylvia Plath’s

Daddy, which is directly quoted in Part 3: Circle— “Every woman adores a Fascist / The boot in

the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.” Through her blank verse, we get an abstract

but meaningful portrait of Skaja’s particular “brute”. He is violent, neglectful, and belittling.

Skaja as the narrator and protagonist is in a constant state of transformation. In her second poem,

“Brute Strength”, she writes of her younger self as “that witch girl / unafraid of anything,

flea-spangled little yard rat, runt of no litter”. In the third poem, “It’s Impossible to Keep White

Moths”, she writes of her current self: “Facing South, I can make myself apologize / for

anything.” Throughout the collection, we watch Skaja regain access to this “witch girl” with an
unshakable confidence in her own ability to morph between relationships and sustain her own

sense of self.

Aside from Skaja and her former partner, there are several other characters traversing the

landscape of Brute. Most of these characters are unnamed or used only as addresses at the

beginning of a piece: the mysterious subject in “For Ruth” and the unidentified single-letter

representatives in “Letter to S, Hospital” and “Elegy for R”. This section of characters have less

of a meaningful impact on the language than they do as general tone-setters. Ruth, for instance,

introduces a spiritual context for the history of female oppression in romantic relationships. “S”

helps Skaja explore failed love as a symptomatic illness, and “R” places romance within a wider

lens of all relationships, most notably a parental figure who committed suicide when Skaja was

in her youth. All of these subjects play a valuable role in Brute’s narrative current, but none quite

so important as Katie.

This particular character plays a clear tertiary role in the collection; where Skaja is the

protagonist and her ex is the villain, Katie is a trusty confidant and equally vulnerable companion

in expired girlhood (which Skaja laments repeatedly). While her name is only mentioned outright

in two poems (most notably “Dear Katie”) she becomes easily recognizable as the receptor of

bluntness and hilarity even in poems where she isn’t identified. “Dear Katie” is such a departure

from Brute’s soft, nature-dominated descriptions and melancholia that when this sardonic tone

reappears in several poems afterward, the reader is inclined to remember the way Skaja

addresses Katie (and Katie exclusively). Skaja writes directly to her: “Katie, I can’t find a way to

talk about this / but it always happens: I have no standing with the men in my life. / You are the

only one who ever asks me Are you eating?” Later in the collection, in the piece “(Remarkable

the Litter of Birds)”, she recounts “Finally I felt safe enough to ask Katie Is it antifeminist to
starve myself over a boy? / Her response was kind What if we revise the focus of that question.”

We come to know Katie as the nonjudgmental ear for Skaja’s disordered behaviors and the

watchful eye in her narration.

Skaja is at her strongest when she is blunt with us. This is a characteristic of her writing

that builds gradually over the course of the collection. By the final fourth, she’s quoting Carly

Simon and bludgeoning us with vulgar texts. In “Brute Force,” she writes “Please stop

colonizing all of our mutual friends with your dick.” It’s a contemporary approach to poetry and

a staggeringly millennial choice— but one that the modern reader will love, all the same. And it

has the intended effect. After thirty poems describing romance through trees and rivers and

wolves and flocks of birds, this Katie-reminiscent tone is a welcome change of pace. It packs a

punch in a way that Skaja’s usual style is unable to at this point in the collection. She has a

crafty, precise hand with language about the natural world, about her own body and the way she

feels trauma, mentally and physically. But after so much discussion of these same topics, over

and over, the audience is desensitized. As a poet, Skaja has an expert sense for this shift, when it

happens, and how to remedy it without coming across as too heavy-handed. This flippant

approach to healing comes across as a natural unveiling of Skaja’s unfiltered voice.

Throughout Brute, Skaja scattered several elegies. Most of them border on prose, but pass

as blank verse in the context of the collection. In her final installment of this motif, “Elegy with

Sympathy”, Skaja writes “Is it a system—if the water wants to drown us—is it? If I say it’s the

water’s fault… I don’t want to take back all my trying.” This passage is a remarkable reflection

of the rest of the collection. Skaja acknowledges the bigger picture of romantic doom and

societal unlearning, but doesn’t lose her hope for future peace. As a showcase of Skaja’s poetic
portfolio, especially as her debut collection, Brute shows the immense breadth of Skaja’s range

and abilities. She is succinct, ever-remembering, and ready to tell her story.