The Song Cave

Emily Skillings’s highly-anticipated second collection of poems, Tantrums in Air, is a wild romp through verbal reality, marking her as one of contemporary poetry's shining stars of humor, insight, and edge. Skillings writes through various poetic forms, reminding the reader how tenuous the line can be between a poem and, say, an Amazon review of the poet’s first book. Featuring a ballet in four acts--"part ghost, part sponge / a lump of pure refusal"—addresses to past loves—"I circle the circle / Of a compact mirror, open"—and an unconventional treatise on education,Tantrums in Air is smart and honest, reinventing both what’s possible and what we should expect from poetry.