Arts Beat: After two miscarriages, Emily Skaja was drowning. So she wrote a book of poems.
Emily Skaja is an award-winning poet who teachs at the University of Memphis. (Courtesy Houston Cofield)
After her second miscarriage, Emily Skaja was a ghost, a conspiracy theorist, a transparent eyeball, a mother to a loaf of bread.
That is what the Memphis poet pens in her latest book, “Black Lake,” an exploration of her two pregnancy losses as she maps her grief and its surprises. “Black Lake” is available Sept. 8 with a special dual-release party at Novel.
“In the six months directly following my second pregnancy loss,” Skaja said, “I felt like I was being poisoned by grief and that I just had to get that out of myself in whatever way that I could. So these poems came pouring out of me.”
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Kelsey Bowen
Kelsey Bowen is a born-and-bred Memphian with publications in Creative Nonfiction magazine and at the Library of Congress, who occasionally moonlights as a writing teacher. You can usually find her digging around a Summer Avenue antique mall or seated at a Malco movie theater.
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