Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2012 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry
Selected by Arthur Sze
Hyperboreal originates from diasporas. It attempts to make sense of change and to prepare for cultural, climate, and political turns that are sure to continue. The poems originate from the hope that our lives may be enriched by the expression of and reflection on the cultural strengths inherent to indigenous culture. It concerns King Island, the ancestral home of the author's family until the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly and permanently relocated its residents. The poems work towards the assembly of an identity, both collective and singular, that is capable of looking forward from the recollection and impact of an entire community's relocation to distant and arbitrary urban centers. Through language, Hyperboreal grants forum to issues of displacement, lack of access to traditional lands and resources and loss of family that King Island people—and all Inuit—are contending with.
Review
“‘Arnica nods heavy-headed on the bruised slope.’ In these vivid, disturbing, and mysterious poems, written in English and Inupiaq, Joan Kane writes out of the landscape and language of the far north. Hyperboreal is situated at a threshold between cultures, between inner and outer worlds, and the poems are voiced with a ‘knife blade at the throat’s slight swell.’ Her compelling vision is earned through a language that will dislocate in order to relocate and whose tonal shifts are exact and exacting.”
—Arthur Sze
Review
“Kane’s lyric voice is terse, lapidary; each of these poems is, as John Taggart would have it, a ‘room for listening.’ There is an immense and insistent stillness here, ‘From / the forest / the wind / has all revised’ to the ‘dreams inlaid with rigid marrow.’ These are songs of ‘intaction,’ of that which endures, poised against ‘the / long fermata of dusk / and its promised repetition.’”
—G. C. Waldrep
Review
“I am mesmerized by these poems, their sonorous pathways across time and place; how they absorb and let me linger awhile in their stark beauty. Joan Kane has created a genuine indigenous poetic, irreducible, a point of reorigination and new beginnings. Hyperboreal will be remembered and celebrated.”
—Sherwin Bitsui
Review
If Hyperboreal is, in part, an elegy to a dying culture, its authors exquisitely lithic imagery and arresting, angular syntax may at least renew our faith in the power of language. Kane articulates an enduring vision of the world, both abstract and scrupulously grounded, collective and stunningly intimate.”
--Zyzzyva
Review
"Emerson suggests that ‘genius is the activity that repairs the decay of things. Such genius is at work in Patakys debut, Overwinter. . . . [Its] a book that makes of the hearts affections a myriad world, where presence and absence intertwine, and the poet is no more than faithful recorder of difficulty and wonder."
Review
"What is at stake in 'Hyperboreal' is not only the threat of 'cultural and biological extinction' faced by the Inupiaq people of Alaska, but also the contested place of the human in that landscape and more particularly, the lyric subject. Kane questions its customary property (which is loss) and its dream of deliverance from extinction through craft. . . In this book, we are never far from the prospective end of a line of human beings, if not the extinction of the landscape."
—Boston Review
Review
“Demonstrates the poet’s own vigorous and powerful lyric strokes, galvanizing and preserving an ancient relationship between humanity and the most northern landscapes of Earth. Kane’s language, images, and lines are electric and deliberate--lasting impressions of ‘a thousand / Summer days in extravagant succession.’ [‘Hyperboreal’] offers a confident and impressionistically lasting poet voice; and it portrays a philosophy of humble coexistence with nature.”
—American Microreviews and Interviews
Review
"In a word, Overwinter is about life. Maybe not everyone's life in entirety, but aspects—small details—are related through the eons-long relationship between man and nature. . . . There is much of this introspection and observation, and while it deals with concerns of Alaskan life there is also something for a broader readership in these poems. There's something for anyone that is willing to still their mind, listen and look."
Review
“Pataky’s debut poetry collection, examines the speaker’s isolation and solace in the vast, untamed nature of the Alaskan wilderness. Throughout the collection, the speaker spends his time between a developed city, with its electricity and human companionship, and the natural Alaskan landscape filled with its braided streams, unpredictable wildlife, and endless illusions of light and depth.”
Synopsis
Winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry
Selected by Arthur Sze
Synopsis
Winner of the 2012 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry
Selected by Arthur Sze
Hyperboreal leverages the power of language and lyric as its poems contend with issues of Inuit cultural and biological extinction.
Synopsis
Jeremy Pataky's debut collection measures familial and romantic love against the wildness of the far north and the self. Remote settings provide both a solace and challenge where the speakers aloneness resists loneliness in full, and fully imagined, places. This is not a static vision, though; the present harkens back to a verdant but distant past. Nor is it a silent world. These poems reconcile the natural quiet and sounds of wilderness with the clamor of built environments. Pataky lives this contrast, migrating seasonally between Anchorage and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. These poems bridge the urban and rural, unifying them through an eros that is by turns fevered and serene. The book is haunted by all those the poet has loved, and they survive in the hidden places sculpted by language.
Synopsis
A debut collection from an exciting new voice in Alaska poetry, Overwinter reconciles the natural quiet of wilderness with the clamor of built environments. Jeremy Pataky’s migration between Anchorage and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park inspires these poems that connect urban to rural. This duality permeates Overwinter. Moments are at turns fevered or serene. The familial and romantic are measured against the wildness of the Far North. Empty spaces bring both solace and loneliness in full. Past loves haunt the present, surviving in the spaces sculpted by language.
About the Author
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. Her recent honors include the 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a Creative Vision Award from United States Artists, and a Rasmuson Foundation Artist Fellowship. Kane is on the faculty of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and received the 2014 Indigenous Writer in Residence fellowship at the School for Advanced Research. She also received the Whiting Writers’ Award for her first poetry collection, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife.
Table of Contents
I.
Five Parts
Manual Labor in the Era of Delinquent Weather
We Were Explorers Once
Then to Now
Reasons for a Long Stay
Antidote
Wood Heat
Runoff
II.
A Brief History of Landing Here
The Particulars of the Built Environment
Counting Down to a Destination within Bliss
Barometric Pressure
Here We Are
Fire in the Succession Zones
From Here You Seem a Braided River
Screen
Aural
III.
Fata Morgana
IV.
Surveying
Contemplation, Composition, Interpretation
Modernity
How the Mistress, Distressed, Insinuated Herself into Place
Succession
In Review
Field Work
V.
After This Life
Address from a Far-off Hill
Trash Burning
The Smallest Ice Age
Inroad
Ablation Zone
Traverse
Thumbnail Spring Song
Sky Behind Weather
Steeped
The Wild Dead
Acknowledgements