Emily Skillings’ Tantrums in Air

Alexandra Romero

Book Review

A review of Emily Skillings’ Tantrums in Air (The Song Cave). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.

The unexpected, in poetry and in life, is often what compels us. I first encountered Emily Skillings’ poetry one morning by accident, in search of a time-killer, while my boyfriend was in the shower. Browsing his bookshelf, I pulled down the eye-catching green spine of Fort Not, and by the afternoon, I’d finished it, started on a second read, and snuck the book into my own bag. When my birthday rolled around, I unwrapped his gift to find my very own copy of Fort Not—no doubt in part conceived of an ulterior motive to get my klepto hands off his copy—which he’d had signed for me by the poet herself. The book would spend the next several months becoming closely acquainted with the contents of my daily purse, my commutes around New York, the toils and joys of my own writing life.

Skillings’ highly anticipated second collection, Tantrums in Air, was published by The Song Cave in June 2025. Shortly prior to its release, in a cramped and sweltering apartment-turned-art-gallery, I’d had the pleasure of hearing her read aloud one of its forthcoming poems, “Gargouillade.” The poem’s final lines, which she delivered with a wry smile, exhibit the same knack for surprise that suffused Fort Not: 

… Later I discover 

the scent is coming from the scrawny potted jasmine 

blooming in the corner, dropping her 

syrup on the floor. It’s nice to meet a fellow 

whore in the world.

Fans of her work will recognize a marked Skillingsism—lulled as we’ve been by her sensuous play with language and line, the word “whore” jumps out like a laughing weapon—in this and many other poems in Tantrums in Air. Her concern with language is a joyful one: engaging the reader in an experience that feels at times more like co-writing than reading, she invites us to halt momentarily, pick a strewn word up like a stone, and inspect what’s underneath it. 

Perhaps the most overt engagement with word-as-object occurs in the poem “Turpentine,” a brief narrative in which the post-coital speaker and her second-person lover play a game called WORDS. Though WORDS is explicitly “not a game of quick association / or one of blurting,” our speaker thoughtfully warns us of her tendencies—“You cautioned me / against a kind of cleverness / to which you must have felt I was predisposed”—before the game begins. Then: “‘TUMBLE’ you said. ‘CELERY’ / I replied, almost instantly.” What follows is a word-choice candyland as the speaker gradually fidgets into the patience required of the game, delightfully diverting into associative forays about both the demands of this game and the lives of individual words. The pairing of “MOLLUSK” and “CLAM,” for example, invites us to investigate their sonic symmetry: we notice that the m in “mollusk” mirrors the m in “clam,” just as the k sound mirrors that of the c, while the vowel-cushioned ls mediate the harsher consonants in both words. The pairing comes alive subtly in its bilateral symmetry, building on the sonic interest present separately in “mollusk” and “clam” (as the speaker remarks, “clam” is “more vulgar”). In a move both natural and slightly unexpected, we then join the speaker in the realm of associative memory: 

Once I’d sat at a picnic table near the place of my birth, looking out at the

sea, eating a bucket of bivalves that when steamed, are commonly referred 

to as “steamers.” Bringing one up to my face, I found a transparent worm 

jutting out of the grit of its belly, like a hand reaching out of a grave. 

Butter had dropped nauseatingly from the whole organism.

In turn, we find ourselves compelled to examine each word offered in the poem’s banquet through our own associative lens. This is no accident; Skillings has cultivated a body of work in this collection that teaches us how to handle each word delicately at first, then voraciously. “Turpentine” culminates in a seven-line geyser of all-caps vocab words at once frenetic and focused, before slowing to a simmer: “‘… DRUM. WORKER. LOG. AMBER. CUBE. FOOTSTEPS. EAR. / FOUND. HERON. QUESTION. NONE.’ I realized then that some / version of this game would likely continue for the rest of my life.” 

We shouldn’t be surprised that this collection pays such close attention to the word as an individual; Skillings is forthright about her poetic concerns from its opening poem. The first stanza of “Rose-Crowned Night Girl” draws our attention to words as animate objects, delivering lines such as “the words rub each other / until they are dull” and “I look where little nodes of language cling, / lichen-like, to what will have them.” The ensuing collection offers not a thorough explanation, but a study in pursuit of understanding language’s strange phenomena—where does it gather? How and why does it cling? 

If words are lichen, Skillings’ lines are what will have them. No two poems take the same form in Tantrums in Air; each one, rather, determines its own shape. The collection’s titular poem, laying claim to thirteen pages, is a masterclass on the line—as it moves from sections that pare down the line to a granular level to those of longer, lyrical tinseling, the poem is unafraid to break from form the moment it is established. The reader hears a certain fitting staccato demanded by the lineation in this stanza:

labored

ecstatic 

song

of

the

twenty-

foot

drill

Not long later, this turbulence has settled to a gentle rocking: “Ali turns to me. ‘Emily, sometimes I think I was hungry in the womb.’” comprises its own page. The poem never breaks a line for the mere sake of breaking, instead allowing both sonic and material energy to mold the language into its desired form. This deepens our reading, as it allows us to further grasp Skillings’ essential dexterity of poetic form—that which allows the reader to experience each poem intimately, and on its own terms.

Those concerned with speaker and voice will find much to investigate; while we must, of course, respect the distinction between speaker and writer, the material in Tantrums in Air suggests an autobiographical “I” throughout. However, it is Skillings’ use of the “I” that sets her work apart from the direct contact that readers have come to expect from the first person in contemporary poetry. The speaker in these poems sounds autobiographical, but is she? The choice to write in first person here serves a specific purpose: Skillings’ natural tone produces the effect of deceptively familiar conversation. By the time we realize that many layers of distance separate us from this so-called “I,” we are well past questioning the plausibility of the assumed reality—often the surreality—that sets each poem’s stage.

Consider the opening lines of the collection’s final poem, “A Room in Dumb Bitchville,” a four-page poem which, appropriately, turns the reader’s head—the print rotates ninety degrees to accommodate its line length—“Hello. Can you hear me? If not me, do you hear the notifications sweetly intoning? / This is where I come when I’m sad or even confused. Come in. I keep adjusting the layout.” Only after yielding to the speaker’s warm tone do we realize that we don’t know where we are. Do we need to know? Like much of Skillings’ work, this poem requires its reader to remain untethered from the comfort of logical consistency. In the hands of a less able poet, this departure from logic might unravel into gibberish, but here a perfect syntactic logic becomes our main anchor, and, thus anchored, we are willing to proceed without—or perhaps embracing—uncertainty. For our trust in the speaker, we’re rewarded with lush language, delightful surreal imagery, and that same conversational voice which appropriately closes the poem, and the collection: 

I remember the shells I would bring to her. She would thank me in her former 

voice,

gone now, almost light green. Wet mauve, like mouths not singing

along. Little porcelain cradles. And at one time they were everywhere. 

You don’t see them much anymore, do you? Lady slippers, I think they were 

called.

As a reader and a poet, much of what I loved about Fort Not is present—and further developed—in Skillings’ second collection. To call back a phrase from Fort Not’s closing poem, “Bay,” Skillings’ knack for identifying a “smudge at the tip of thought” is one of the principal joys of her second collection, and her route to this accomplishment in Tantrums in Air is notably singular. It is through a unique combination of poetic skill—a respect for each line’s entity, nuanced use of narrative voice, and meticulous attention to the word—applied alongside Skillings’ keen eye for that coveted, mysterious je ne sais quoi humming below the surface of language that earns this collection consistent praise, including a place on the New York Times’ Best Poetry of 2025, and on my own personal favorites list.

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Tantrums in Air

Emily Skillings

The Song Cave

121pp

$19

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Alexandra Romero is an Associate Poetry Editor with Indirect Books.