Corpse Whale (Sun Tracks)
An experimental poetry collection that folds mythic sensibility and contemporary experience together from an Inupiat perspective. Memory of land and community intersects in sharp, vivid images.
Work Information
Arctic sensibility meets the experimental energy of contemporary poetry.
As dg nanouk okpik’s debut collection, the book overlays traditional storytelling with contemporary poetic method. Memory of land and body rises vividly throughout.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of Arizona Pr
- Published
- 2012-10-11
- Pages
- 101 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 1.02 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780816526741
- ISBN-10
- 0816526745
- Price
- 3406 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
A self-proclaimed &;vessel in which stories are told from time immemorial,&; poet dg nanouk okpik seamlessly melds both traditional and contemporary narrative, setting her apart from her peers. The result is a collection of poems that are steeped in the perspective of an Inuit of the twenty-first century&;a perspective that is fresh, vibrant, and rarely seen in contemporary poetics. Fearless in her craft, okpik brings an experimental, yet poignant, hybrid aesthetic to her first book, making it truly one of a kind. &;It takes all of us seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling to be one,&; she says, embodying these words in her work. Every sense is amplified as the poems, carefully arranged, pull the reader into their worlds. While each poem stands on its own, they flow together throughout the collection into a single cohesive body. The book quickly sets up its own rhythms, moving the reader through interior and exterior landscapes, dark and light, and other spaces both ecological and spiritual. These narrative, and often visionary, poems let the lives of animal species and the power of natural processes weave into the human psyche, and vice versa. Okpik&;s descriptive rhythms ground the reader in movement and music that transcend everyday logic and open up our hearts to the richness of meaning available in the interior and exterior worlds.
dg nanouk okpik is a resident advisor at Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. Her poetry appears in the books Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing , and Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas .
Reviews
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Digging into the Culture of the Far North
While looking for a few words to accompany a photo of umiaks (seal skin whaling boats) framed in Northern Lights I'd made a few years ago, I came across these lines from okpik's poem "Tulunigraq: Something Like a Raven": Quarrtsiluni sitting in silence where all things and all beings reach back into time before iron and oil. Okpik arranges her images across the page in a manner that forces the reader to go slowly, to breathe slowly, to see, and to hear, and I felt myself being taken back - to Alaska's North Slope, to the village of Point Hope and to other places I'd been in the far north, and then further back, to places I had never been - to old Tikigaq, to villages and settings scattered across Alaska and Greenland and beyond, to a time, indeed, "before iron and oil." Okpik's writing is sure and precise, at times reminiscent of carefully sifting through an archeological dig, anticipating what might be found, in awe of what is found. The culture she invites the reader into is one of myth-making, spirituality, subsistence hunting and gathering, veneration of elders and ancestors and a closeness to sinew and cold. The landscape is one of ice and sea, of magma cooling, the vast sweep of the tundra. Threaded through this are spirits and caribou, whales and ground squirrels, edible plants and seal oil lamps, Eucharist wafers and hooligan jigs. Okpik has given us poems that take us to places and to times few of us have experienced or will experience. The journey is mesmerizing.
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Great book of poetry.
Her work is amazing.