Cover Art: Ebecho Muslimova
Tantrums in Air
The Song Cave, 2025
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.
Skillings’s poems read a bit like absurdist theater set in a haunted dollhouse . . . mesmerizing. — Elisa Gabbert, “The Best Poetry of 2025,” The New York Times
In her excellent sophomore outing, Skillings combines the brutal and acerbic honesty of confessionalism with the self-deprecating humor of the New York School to create an irresistibly original work...Full of vivid imagery and humorous barbs targeting both the self and the wider nonsensical world, this is unforgettable. — Publishers Weekly
Skillings’s poems enact the gentle tug-of-war that takes place between thought and observation, a casual braiding of the two together – like a double helix – a mode of steady accumulation and association that brings James Schuyler’s poetry to mind, in which attending to the mundane can produce the mundane’s opposite — Rowland Bagnell, PN Review
Like a manuscript page of an Emily Dickinson poem, with its dinosaur-track scrawl and midden heaps of word variants, Skillings’s dazzling poems always refuse the limits of the page (and the mind) even as they acutely attend to lineation, margins, voltas, and the sonic and etymological slippages of the words we use to make and unmake worlds. — Lisa Russ Spaar, The Adroit Journal
At the heart of Tantrums in Air is a simple message: existence as a human being is complicated. The world can make one feel less than one, but that’s just a stop along the way (maybe there are multiple visits, but it’s still only a single stop). This collection begins with feeling “pointless,” but that’s not where it ends. In real time we read Skillings’s speaker thinking through her personal and professional concerns, laugh with her, get frustrated with her, and ultimately, feel empathy with her. What kind of world would it be without poets like Skillings? I don’t want to know. — Nate Logan, On The Seawall.
Making me, the reader, turn the book sideways made me feel like I no longer knew how books work. Forget what you know about poetry, Skillings says. Turn it over in your mind; it’s not like that. Be too dumb to read, and then read. — Niina Pollari, Zona Motel
Tantrums in Air is a brilliant, rivetingly original collection of poems, careening between high-femme camp performance, paranormal incantation, and sparkling dispatches from a mind mid-thought. These poems are obsessed with surfaces: those we touch and penetrate and barter, yes, but especially those we make using language, with its “blueblack liquid” and “opalescent scars” and “hooks and eyes / That open worlds.” For my money, Emily Skillings is simply one of the most exciting poets writing today. —Maggie Millner
The poems of Emily Skillings return me to repeated innocence, a second childhood in the midst of a middling adulthood revoked by the saying of bald things like “I am pointless” or “I love nature” that brutally reset the sense one has of oneself. Actually, this happens by way of a feral pivot from the bluntly plain to the “surreal order of things” in which “[r]aspberry sorbet / replaces the body / of the oyster” and worms grow drunk on sound. It sort of kills me to observe this happen. By “sort of” I mean Skillings so casually keeps me teetering on the brink of sense, it makes me mad—very mad and very happy. —Aditi Machado
These poems are stitched with lush, unforeseen textures and unexhausted time. They are virtuosic, impolite, and I want to eat or possibly mainline them. They make the ghost of John Keats smile in ecstasy. Raymond Roussel would have kept this collection under his pillow. —Lucy Ives