Emily Skaja’s Brute contains poems edged with trauma. The speaker, a survivor of an abusive relationship, attempts to assemble a linear narrative of events that will never be linear or be cohesive. It will always be fractured, but in this fracturing, she finds a way to heal.

Because of a past relationship, Skaja’s speaker is relegated to the margins, the “swamp-woods” of “Brute Strength.” In these brute-leaden poems, such as “The Brute / Brute Heart,” Skaja’s syntax maps the traumatized psyche. The lines, stripped of punctuation, reflect the rupture of the speaker’s mind. She cannot punctuate her thoughts. Life no longer contains logic. There is no reason for her to stay with this man, but she stays anyway. Given these circumstances, Skaja trails into an unknown space in “In March When You Tell Me You Don’t”; again, eschewing punctuation and rational thought, the speaker drifts into the conditional, uncertain as to her future:

If I can be If I can be If I can be
A tunnel either leafing or branching or----
                                   If I can be If I can be If I can be

This ending is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s abyss into which the speaker seems to disappear in “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” When the unknown does not loom before Skaja’s speaker, fantasies of flight saturate the collection. Before she finds the courage to fly, she remains a voyeur, attuned to birds and their ability to escape, from her remark that “a vulture / can’t be a common filed crow” and “blackbirds / [were] tearing out from under the hickories” in section one, “My History As.” In these moments, the fantasies offer a safe space for the speaker: time ceases to exist, the differences between before and after blur, and therefore there is nothing to do but live vicariously through the birds.

Skaja traces not only the psychological, but also the physical effects of trauma. In “Elegy with Rabbits,” she admits, “I need to remember how to be a body.” Skaja aggrieves the impossibility for women to escape pain in “Girl Saints”: “O LORD, when the Angel said Listen / when the Angel said Do not fall to the earth for anyone // we were already stained in glass.” Pain is inscribed in every female’s history, from the biblical Eve and Ruth to the mythological Penelope and Eurydice. Skaja’s speaker is not the first, nor is she the last woman to face this misfortune. However, by “Elegy with Feathers,” the speaker begins to transcend the traumatic past by becoming a gull with “white gloss, feathers.” This transformation does not come easily; after all, the speaker has the a survivor of abuse’s pathology and blames herself for staying in the relationship. She descends into a spiral of shame in “Indictment”: “Didn’t I tell you & didn’t I tell you Emily / [. . .] not to raise up your arms like a waxwing bird / like you’re free[?]”

The speaker ultimately ends up overlooking a “bright landscape,” the collection’s titular fourth section. In the final poem, the speaker invokes Eurydice and tells the Greek goddess that “It’s ending.” The trauma, the grief, the rage are still there, but she is leaving the past in the past. By this poem, the speaker has reclaimed her agency, and promises, “I will lead myself out of it”—out of the cellar where she has housed these horrifying, yet formative memories, and where she has been trapped. She is back on solid ground, and she is ready to live again, to be a body again.