Professor Emily Skillings ’17 Publishes New Book ‘Tantrums in Air’
Adjunct Assistant Professor and Writing alum Emily Skillings ’17 has a new book of poems, Tantrums in Air, out June 17, 2025 from publisher The Song Cave. The collection marks her second time working with the indie press, following 2017’s Fort Not in a collaboration that began while she was still completing her MFA at Columbia.
Fellow poets were quick to praise the new work. Maggie Millner called the book, “a brilliant, rivetingly original collection of poems, careening between high-femme camp performance, paranormal incantation, and sparkling dispatches from a mind mid-thought.”
“The poems of Emily Skillings return me to repeated innocence, a second childhood,” offered Aditi Machado. “Skillings so casually keeps me teetering on the brink of sense, it makes me mad—very mad and very happy.”
For Skillings, the publication is the culmination of a years-long journey, and the path forward was not always clear. “I had about 75 pages of poems in no particular order that I'd written since 2017,” said Skillings, “it didn’t feel like a book.” However, with the encouragement of “one of those great friends that every poet should have,” she began to find the connective tissue.
“I realized that many of the poems had to do with my doubts around my own mind, something I was aware of previously but hadn't yet thought of as a kind of scaffolding or arc,” she explained. “I then started cutting things away and imagining what could go in their place. I could see it.”
Skillings’ unique process contributed to the eclectic nature of the collection, channeling a variety of voices and inspirations. “Jack Spicer spoke of poetry as a kind of dictation, something that comes from the outside like a radio dispatch as opposed to something that originates inside us, and I've always loved this idea of ‘tapping in’ to a voice,” she said.
Skillings also noted the contributions of the team at Song Cave. “I absolutely love working with the editors, Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes,” she said. “The care and attention and humanity you get with a small press is unmatched.”
In addition to her books with Song Cave, Skillings’ work has been published by outlets including Poetry, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. She also served as editor for a collection by John Ashbery, is a member of the feminist poetry collective Belladonna* Collaborative, and teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia.
With a prolific career that continues to grow, Skillings is a wealth of information and ideas. Her advice for students looking to build their practice? “I think poetry is about friendships,” she said. “Make friends with other poets and hold them close, even (especially) if their writing is really different from yours. Make friends with people who aren't artists at all, write to them too.
“Even the most self-oriented poetry is about relation.”