Brute by Emily Skaja (Walt Whitman Award Winner, 2018)

Selected by Joy Harjo as the winner for the 2018 Walt Whitman Award.

“Brute, though a collection of singular poems, is essentially one long elegiac howl for the end of a relationship. It never lets up—this living—even when the world as we knew it is crushed. So what do we do with the brokenness? We document it, as Emily Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” —Joy Harjo