'The poems in Emily Skaja's Brute speak of brutality, of breaking, of endings, of beginnings. Brute is an elegy for a relationship's end, an intimate excavation, but also, these poems are a rhapsody, a rage. Skaja's poetry is deft, nimble, willing to inhabit contradictions - 'What is this impulse in me to worship & crucify / anyone who leaves me.' Each poem is exquisitely crafted, visceral, indelible. Brute will cut right through you, cut deep, but the writing is so assured, so necessary, that you will welcome the wound' Roxane Gay

'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' Joy Harjo, judge's citation for the Walt Whitman Award

"Emily Skaja's [Brute] is lyrical, visceral, sharp like a fang, and filled with lines that pierce and prod and stay embedded inside your skin' NYLON

'Brute is an unflinching exploration of gender, violence, and recovery. . . . Within the pain of Skaja's poetry is an unrelenting force, a brutish will to survive that bursts forth with every stanza, announcing her resilience' Paris Review

'Skaja's poems are both primal scream-songs and elegies to the end of a relationship . . . With relentless, driving energy, Skaja's poems seek brutal truths while searching for meaningful transformation' Booklist