Tantrums in Air by Emily Skillings

*Pubdate is June 17th, 2025!*

*Presale begins in May, 2025*

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

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her recent poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Granta, FOLDER, The Drift, and the New York Review of Books. Tantrums in Air is her second book.

Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Skillings currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.