Black Lake: Poems

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?”