Emily Skillings. Tantrums in Air. New York: The Song Cave, 2025. 96 pages.
 




        Is a poem a provocation? I wondered about that while reading Tantrums in the Air. A provocation does not anticipate likeness; it is not in dialogue with you. Every piece of writing contains within it some provocation, but the shades by which a poem, an essay, a play anticipates—welcomes—reader response varies. These poems, too. For example: the digestibility of products to beautify (all caps) in Secret Sauce, verse bordering on a pop anthem, the easy calories, that want you only to nod along (82-83). Or the churlish flirtation with death in A Draped Urn, “I am jealous of the dead/and need only the slightest nudge/ in order to join them/in lushness…” (97) too easy! Then there is the obvious vulgarity in The Duke’s Forest, “…Today I saw/ nine pussies in the trees./ one was forest art, carved/by someone I felt I’d already met…On my little walk I scratched/ my asshole vigorously/right in front of a German family: Mama, Papa, two kids, two/ little white dogs. This gave me/great energy…” (11) The balder provocation in the words ‘pussy’ and ‘asshole,’ but I smiled when I read “it gave me great energy” as if reading from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, that formal disembodied voice of a visitor, estranged from oneself. A sight gag, this kind of poetry play, the provocation, especially lined up right after the sucker punch of coarseness. Another provocation: the book’s cover of open eyes and breasts and orifices splayed in cartoonish crowd.

“A poem is about a kind of wrecked, radical distillation. A poem can't hand you a rose, but what it can do is pulverize it into this image that will linger,” Skilling said in a recent interview [1]. It makes me wonder about the author, the context for their specific mix of demand and dialogue. I’d also like to read a poem without knowing anything about the author; I’d like to believe that biography doesn’t have to figure at all. I wish I had never seen an author photo or heard the word “Brooklyn” in relation to this book. Because this book recalls for me a bit of James Tate’s The Lost Pilot, the chatter and pathos of O’Hara. But it is also familiar in a more superficial way, a cultural familiarity. In Tantrums in the Air, I get the radical distillation—the provocation—but I love the impression more.

There are moments in Tantrums in Air that are timelessly, poetically beautiful, hitting the sweet spot of saying something by saying a lot of other things. Take “Gargouillade”: “If, as I suspect, all language as died/for me, at least for the time being, then I’ll trot/out the little reeking phonemes,/ the dancing spines, the disremembered—/and I promise I will not try….” And later in the poem, “I want to be a poet entirely/ of a different kind. Later I discover/the scent is coming from the scrawny potted jasmine/blooming in the corner, dropped her syrup on the floor...’ (66). The gorgeousness of “I’ll trot/ out the little reeking phonemes/the dancing spines” and the dropped syrup on the floor is heady. Even the ending “It’s nice to meet a fellow/whore in the world” works by the visual and the audial coupling of ‘floor’ and ‘whore’—enrobed in the scent of jasmine. These poems make language silly putty, elastic and imbued with some magic whereby the action of words coming together enjoins your interpretation to the whole making multidimensional extrasensory effect.

Skillings’ voice is decidedly of this time; self-aware, cool, underlined with a preoccupation of authenticity and consequence. The poems speak to a modern anxiety of a world rich in material and sensual opportunity, and a stubbornness to retain something singular. There is an argument in these poems that now, this phrase, no matter how irrelevant is relevant. There is a stake in the ground that such direct reflection of modernity is as valid, if not equal to, timelessness. It is the defining feature of a generation, to stake this claim—to demand that ambivalence is just as meaningful, just as profound as any other sentiment: a teetering commitment to the Millennial practice of ‘I.’ In “Balustrade”: “I now feel I made a huge mistake, but the attending sensation, / like a dilating engine, a pump exchanging the interior with the exterior/cannot be retrieved. But isn’t this…living?” (34)

Skillings does something timeless in the twitchy modern meditations, she makes incidental sublimity, she plays. There is the familiar angst that the gloss, the ease of understanding the engine in the words—that what is superficially interesting is not actually substantive. In the same poem, “To be casual and yet precise is the near-unattainable goal into which we dig/ our collective heels…” Another familiar touchstone—the posture and the goal. (Insert any number of musical or literary figures whose stardom is hitched to making the goal look effortless.) The poems call up easy cultural references braided into the sublime. Take this in Daphne, “Rachel, your most glamorous friend/ Muses that the present has become/ For all children, an ambient gel/ In which the catastrophic and the banal/ Ride in indistinguishable frequencies/ She passes you a glass/And soon Delia / Is only a nagging thought / You have worn the black blouse/ Encrusted in sequins…” (64) I thought—the universal glamorous friend named Rachel! And—that black blouse encrusted in sequins! And the glass—well, too many glasses! But in recognizing those elements, I can also feel the gel loosen.

No matter, the poems seem to say, there is work in the play—see the play as work! See collecting as reading; observing, as making; “reading as seeing,” (19) consuming as creating. And in the blurring of experience as creation, the anxiety of that process, of what it may signal about us in this modern life. What can you do? A tantrum to events outside of reason, a wholly human eruption under any circumstance that joins us together and that also dissipates, inevitably, into air. Isn’t it…living?







Works Cited

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[1] Skillings, Emily. “A Poet’s Life: On Making, On Being, On Surviving with Professor Emily Skillings.” Interview by Rebecca Pinwei Tseng. November 3rd, 2021. Columbia University School of the Arts News. https://arts.columbia.edu/news/poet%E2%80%99s-life-making-being-surviving-professor-emily-skillings