SECOND ACTS: A SECOND LOOK AT SECOND BOOKS OF POETRY
A REVIEW OF DEATH OF THE FIRST IDEA BY RICKEY LAURENTIIS (KNOPF, 2025) AND HORSES BY
JAKE SKEETS (MILKWEED, 2026)
By LISA RUSS SPAAR
I’ve been sitting with the second poetry books of Jake Skeets and Rickey Laurentiis for several months. I’d originally planned to pair them for an earlier Second Acts installment early last summer, but two surgeries kept me from meeting that deadline. The delay has been a gift, as the significance of both of these sophomore collections has only deepened for me the more time I’ve had to spend in their respective cosmoses.
I’ve also had time to reflect upon what it is that so intrigues and compels me about a poet’s second collection. I’ve written about this before—how a second book can signal that a poet won’t just be a one-hit wonder. It might suggest a possible ongoing life for one’s poetry, curated and embodied in the world—a “career,” if you will. It might make a person more eligible for a teaching job. Will the second book continue in the same aesthetic vein as the first, concerned with similar material and structural approaches? Or will it deepen and extend the themes and flood subjects in illuminating ways, even perhaps break out into something completely different, what Hart Crane called “new thresholds, new anatomies”?
I know that for me, personally, the leap between my debut collection, Glass Town (Red Hen, 1999) and my second, Blue Venus (Persea Books, 2004) was an important step away from the kind of poetry I’d been trained to write in the 1970s and early 1980s (confessional, free-ranging, driven more by narrative than by music and form), and into what felt more like my own voice: damasked, sonic, interior, even gnomic. And of course I couldn’t have made that leap without first putting together that early work in a debut book to see what it might suggest or presage.
And so I think I’m often looking to see if something like that might happen between debut collections that I’ve loved and their much anticipated second acts. In the case of both Skeets and Laurentiis, each of whom took more than a few years to bring forth their second books (7 years for Skeets, nearly a decade for Laurentiis), I’m struck by how the linguistic and emotional lexicons of the first collections can now been seen in retrospect, creating world-building blocks, seeds, and matrices for the complex realms conjured in each second collection. Both Horses and Death of the First Idea offer worlds that feast on antecedent, honor the magical qualities of language and numbers, and draw on various mythologies, histories, and traumas to give birth to new ideas, (re)new(ing) notions of an evolving self.
*
For Laurentiis, the lines of the very first poem in Death of the First Idea, “Steal Away,” came quite literally long before she had even conceived of a second book. “I actually started this very first poem about ten years ago,” she says in an interview with James C. Morehead about the book for Viewless Wings, “on the day that Michael Jackson died. I remember this not because it’s related to the poem, but because I was at Cave Canem for I think the first time, and we were on the bus. I was sitting next to Nicole Sealey, and that first line just came to me: ‘Not to the Boy, not even Quite his Body, but to his Boundary…’ This was well before I understood I was trans, well before I transitioned, before everything. It’s a testament to what poems can do. [Death of the First Idea] looks into the past, but it also sees a future where trans and queer identities can be celebrated and welcomed.”
Even the title for the second collection preceded it by a decade. In the Viewless Wings interview, Laurentiis goes on to say, “The title came to me as a fragment on its own, like ten years ago, before a book even existed. ‘Death of the First Idea’ came and I was like, what is that? What could that be about? I jotted it down, and I kind of knew instinctively, I was like, ‘oh, that’s my second book,’ which was really strange because with Boy with Thorn, the very last thing I did was choose a title. It was agony to pick Boy with Thorn. In that book, the last poem is the title poem. In this book, the title came first. So I had to work my way into the title, and that happened both in my poetics on the page, but also in my poetics in real space.” And Laurentiis further nods to Boy with Thorn with the epigraph to her second book, a quotation from Jesus of Nazareth, “If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.” The boy speaker in “Boy with Thorn” finally accepts his queer body (“this was his body, his body / finally his”) despite the violences done to it and the shame and shock endured as a result; “He shut the thorn up in his foot,” the poem concludes, “and told his foot / Walk.” Death of the First Idea takes a second look at bodily integrity and identity and celebrates the freedom to change, to choose, to transform. On the title page of the book, the words “FIRST IDEA” are printed in a lighter ink than “DEATH OF THE”; they are already in the process of fading away toward and becoming something else, something new.
Boy with Thorn was highly praised when it appeared in 2015, having been chosen for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Terrance Hayes, who called it “a refuge as open and irrepressible as water, as resolute and penetrating as stone.” In the years following the first book’s appearance, Laurentiis has transitioned, and the long crucible of that alchemical process shimmers throughout the second book even as it perhaps accounts for its long gestation. Her many awards include fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, the NEA, the Poetry Foundation, and others. She is a 2018 Whiting Award winner and currently lives in New Orleans, the city of her birth.
Deeply concerned with transformation, Death of the First Idea is rife with references to myths and mystical texts, from the ancient Greeks, the gnostics, the feminists, the southern Gothic, slave songs, and a host of early drag queens and queer pioneers that allow her to search for antecedents and for current experiences of trans-ness, trans-loneliness, and other non-binary/androgynous identities. A series of poems, the “Tiresiad”s, for example, moves throughout the book like ancient fragments, drawing on accounts of Apollo’s blind seer, famously transformed into a woman for seven years:
The Gods all need their names said back, devotionally;
Like the two hisses, hissing, do miss another.
Now she, too needs herself returned a ways, to a time before gender.
“Teresiad: The Punishment of Tiresias, V”
Wildly, Laurentiis imagines for Tiresias the experience of birthing two daughters during those seven years, confirming the en/in-gendering truth of his transformation into a woman. Another series, “Sometimes Tropic of New Orleans,” similarly punctuates the book with Laurentiis’s characteristic mix of the vernacular and the arcane. In these respects (idiosyncratic capitalizations, gnomic postures, wildly intelligent and wide-ranging perspicacity, erotic syntax, and recherche diction), the poems in this new collection put me much in mind of Lucie Brock-Broido’s work, perhaps most specifically The Master Letters. Here is Laurentiis’s “Sometimes Tropic of New Orleans, I”:
The roses are in Love with the Warm rain today,
And the white herons walk Easy down the Walk.
What is Life but its Weather? My Second Mind weighs
Already under this Given weather, bright as ravens squall
Matter-of-fact fleeing on the hurt Night hour. Life thinks. Life, let it think
it think. (Getting Jussive.). As a Heart thinketh may as well Be. Is there Problem
with the World where the roses Seem to Smack, Smile & Say
Their hearty names? Yes. Apparently, Me. But I, walking, very Fallible,
Delicious subject, pick one, among thorns, as to prove no fear.
I hurt. But I have problemed no World yet today for Being & ain’t it
Just lovely being Feminine, Fine and, God, I’m getting Meta.
Call me Rickey. Now Riis. Now Obsession. I’m that Horrible girl, Big honesty’s spell.
Like what I really hoped for was the menses Blood to drop, for Meaning
To come severely across my life and be Real, initiation. But I could never be female.
I’ve come to think of this book as a kind of breviary. It is almost impossible to take in its intellectual range, courage, passionate rage, and erotic majesty all at once; it contains multitudes: high lyric poems, runic koan-like fragments, a “tall lyric” poem for Palestine, and a long and frank bi-columnar “prose” dispatch of trauma and becoming titled “The Vague Year” (“This is a story refuse explaining why I changed, just that I did, not how, but exactly when. I could have started us earlier, before my Vague Year, when time moved linearly and like empty prose. It was back when I was somebody, celebrated, honored. Yet something had made the Cisness crack from the Body, to one thousand shards, that it scatter open like as many doors, each door an Orisha, a guarded possibility. But when I gave up the ghost, I think, I was most changed”). At every turn, the poems offer illuminations on gender, self, the soul, Eros. This is a book to visit and re-visit, a collection full of so much generous, dazzling humanity and insight that it will likely, as is the case for me, make you feel altered each time you read it.
*
In a review in On the Seawall of Whiting Award recipient Jake Skeets’s debut poetry collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed, 2019), winner of the National Poetry Series, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the American Book Award, I wrote: “[Skeets’s poems] range the fields, train tracks, backseats, coal yards, and watering holes of liminal border towns attuned to the particular roil of the Native American boys and young men who wander in and through them. He attends with exquisite, lyric eroticism to the ways in which their world is shaped by landscape, violence, danger, prejudice, intoxication, Diné language and culture, sexual tension, and the hauntings of a host of familial and tribal ghosts. Soma, word, and world turn into one another everywhere.”
Haunting that first book is the murder of Skeets’s uncle before Skeets was born, and specifically a photograph taken of the uncle months before he died by Richard Avedon as part of his 1980s “In the American West” photography series. Titled “Benson James, Drifter, Route 66, Gallup, New Mexico, 06/30/79,” the photo of Skeets’s uncle is reproduced on the book’s cover. Avedon’s series, shot over a period of several summers, portrays a mix of wanderers, snake handlers, drifters, policemen, carnies—all positioned before a large white drop-cloth that, as I wrote in my review, “removed any context and intensely highlighted the bodies and faces of his subjects. How weirdly lyric, I remember jotting in my notebook, this attempt to remove the kind of ‘story’ that landscape or other surroundings might provide his subjects. Against their seamless, blank backdrops, each person portrayed evinced a terrible isolation.” Benson would be murdered not long after Avedon took his photograph.
It struck me then that Eyes Bottle Dark was in many ways a “writing into and around the space that Avedon’s photographic praxis for that project obliterated—acknowledging the isolation, yes, but also conjuring the tribal, familial, commercial, and geographical forces, often dangerous, that shaped Benson, that shape any person in liminal or marginalized circumstances,” including Skeets. The figures in Skeets’s landscapes often feel inseparable from the fields, backroads, histories, and spirits—but also the cultural and economic and ecological violences that have shaped them. Challenging stereotypical perceptions of native Americans as being somehow more attuned than others with romanticized notions of the natural world, these poems give us a world saturated with gasoline, with petroleum mined out of usurped lands, toxins that stain bodies black, are siphoned out of hijacked gas tanks, that seem to run in the very blood and sperm of boys in a disturbingly ecstatic conflation of desperation and poison.
An unsettling eco/erotic confluency and powerplay continues to permeate the poems in Skeets’s much anticipated second book, Horses (long-listed for the 2026 National Book Award). As in the first book, there are poems of homoerotic need and desire, often depicted in an “economy” of furtiveness and desperation, but in the second book these sexual poems, even the most desperate scenarios often mix in worshipful language—gospel, chancel, prayer—as in these lines from part III of “Bear Oil Deer Yucca”:
he demands I blink open the cloud in every letter
and again they turn into his lips on mine
inside him a language
moans open
ripgut and copper
zipped into a key
this is not the first time you will kneel
before a man like him this is not the first
time you will kneel before a man like him
this is not the first time you will kneel before a man like him
Perhaps the strongest impulse of this second book is the way it leans with an increasingly keen and intense searching into the “archival silence” signaled by those sheer white backdrops in Avedon’s western portraits—wandering into the places, people, words and world-ways erased over time by hegemonic, racial, and environmental forces, a foray perhaps made more possible for Skeets, as he’s developed as a poet, by his ongoing study of Diné language and culture (Skeets is from the Navajo Nation and is currently the Nation’s third poet laureate). In “A Failed Glossary” at the end of the book, Skeets tells us that “the only true glossary you will need for this book is your ear or your eye. Perhaps, the small groove ink makes on paper that you can feel when you trace your finger along the word’s shape.” While he considers translation to be a “refraction,” and himself far from fluent, he offers translations of Diné words and phrases key to the book’s intentions. In a note for the collection’s last poem, “Field Song,” Skeets tells us that the sestina’s six repeated words—field, light, water, morning, time, and wind—are “the words that are used most throughout the collection.”
More than anything in this second book, the land itself is the archive. In order to listen to it, to heed it, all of it, Skeets’s sentient perspective moves with intention from self-centered perception to a decidedly topos-centric way of knowing. In this respect, the book puts me very much in mind of Susan Howe’s “Articulations of Sound Forms in Time” from her 1987 collection Singularities (the series first appeared in a slightly different form in a small press edition from Awede Press). Howe’s fragmented, syntactically vexed sequence attempts to conjure the 17th-century fugue state of the Reverend Hope Atherton, a Massachusetts minister who disappeared into the wilderness following a skirmish with Native Americans in his Massachusetts town. Howe uses distorted found texts and ruptured syntax to fill in gaps in the historical record and also to imagine the disordered, altered state of Atherton’s mind.
Skeets’s project is different in many ways, but it too is concerned with attempting to conjure through “sound forms” the consequences of past violences and the power of what endures. The book is “for the land,” and in its offerings, the sensorium prevails. While it offers up a landscape of devastations, of mercury, lead, microplastics, drought—a place mined and scoured and plundered—it also attends with a palpable sixth sense—part dream, part poem—into what has survived the erasures, as in this last section of “Ghost Lake,” a poem that seems to be, in part, a poem about the end of a relationship (“it’s cliché to say we bloom / for each other { } when I do more / of the blooming”):
there was a lake here you say
I repeat there was a lake here
as if to at least see my voice touch yours
and you trace my lip with your { }
there { } a lake here
and just because there isn’t anymore
doesn’t we mean we don’t feel
the water echo beneath us
In the penultimate line, does the “we” mean that it is impossible for us to hear the echoes of the land before it was taken from us and violated? Out of the contortion of those triple negatives in the last lines (isn’t, doesn’t, don’t) Skeets wrests the possibility that no, that in fact perhaps we can hear the ghost lake, if we listen, look, smell, taste, touch, and dream hard enough. Here is “Opening Light,” a poem that comes later in the book:
gravity is god deep-felt but impossible to see
what might be true what joy:
two birds rigged to cloud
lake shimmer wind kept in dust fog
there are monsters sometimes still deep inside people
opening light thundering through
say this is a step into silence
toward beauty and beauty and everlasting
the air the color of canyon peach
a rain-lit morning in open field
*
In a small chapbook published in Brian Teare’s intrepid Albion Books series, Jean Valentine Abridged: writing a word changing it, C. D. Wright says,“If Agnes Martin was trying to paint ‘the emotions we feel when we see grey geese descending,’ and if Anne Truitt was aiming to make her pieces sing from the inside by her very particular use of ‘lying down color’ and ‘lifting color’—what has Jean Valentine been proposing to achieve with her formally and verbally spare creations? I propose that like them, she aims for transparency; like them, she ‘starts out of a feeling,’ but is not interested in working it through by means of her story. . . Rather than narrate, she is organizing her emotions, in color terms—by their value, that is, by the darkness stove, the light discharged.” In their respective ways (Skeets with spareness, Laurentiis with her “extra” layering), both Skeets and Laurentiis organize their emotions by their value, eschewing straight-ahead narrative or merely identity-facing rhetoric in favor of new creation stories, positioning their experiences of gender, place, and belonging into larger, longer stories of de/re /creation. In “Anthropocenic,” Skeets writes,
: when the nearest light is miles away yet
and adorned on the night is a lightning bug
as in jarred cactus plants
an open book without commas
: when the only thing you can touch is a plastic raft
And drenched between the hours is a cutting board
as in a place for garlic
and onions the face of early sky
: when waters break into tar sands
and to one long tune acacia trees dance some
as in alder and its reach
anything is worth the rain
: when above more and more narrow miracles
and answers set to stone by a single hand
as in a chorus of them
any shadow still means light
In lines that come near the end of “Victim,” the last poem in “Death of the First Idea,” Laurentiis says:
. . . My Soul, if Souls immortal endure due
Changes, kept changing for the damages it politely received, what suffering is, all to Touch
At another Soul pure, which is we’re Born, to be both Self- & otherwise possessed,
That is why transform. Yea! That I am the Victim, Tribute of the Slaughter, giddy Virgin
Bride & the Lamb, in whose Blood, anticipates. Death is the Maker of Origins. . . .
“I wanted this book to be about the end of the world,” Skeets writes in his second book’s Acknowledgments, “and I realized it might be about a new one, caught somewhere at the horizon, like the morning, all blue and crisp. It’s calling to us; if we listen hard enough, we will hear it.” Having stripped away the blank white canvas backdrop with which much of history, like Avedon’s West photographs, obscured the land and its story, Skeets has looked unflinchingly and moved through those ravaged places and their consequences—a terrain of buried horses and diners and mines and dust storms—carrying them with him, as he puts it in “Field Song,” into a “morning on top of another morning. // I carry. What really is left after all of this dries up is the morning / and a mirror—a dimension we catch day after, time after time : / and in the aftertime, I hope to watch you walk in this very field / where words are beetles and still deer soften. The water / when we get to it, is flooding the wash after a heavy storm. Wind / just enough to spur along more song in a beautiful afternoon light. // . . . I open my mouth. I open the field.”
And at the close of “Vernacular History,” a poem about the Middle Passage that also resonates with other kinds of violent prejudice, Laurentis writes:
There is this counsel in my ear
That is my ear; that is my soul turned Maroon; that says a slave can’t speak
like this, think like this, cannot ascend,
to be so-called “genuine.”
But I say someone needs them to, I do, so I write it—
Imagine
The imagination’s power if made, this once, healthier with desire,
Not to raise categories, lines, enslave, or kill—
One could build a home then, finally.
One could resurrect a language light enough to fit our flying into . . .
Through exercising this kind of imagination, she implies, one might build a home and resurrect a language, and thereby (to paraphrase her comment in the Viewless Wings interview) conjure a future where all identities can be renewed, celebrated, and welcomed, a sentiment also celebrated in the new work of Jake Skeets.
***
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of thirteen books of poetry and criticism, most recently Soul Cake. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and a Horace W. Goldsmith National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professorship appointment for 2016–2018. She is a professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she has taught since 1993. Spaar founded the Area Program in Poetry Writing in 2000 and directed the Creative Writing Program for many years.
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