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Blood Snow
American Book Award–winning poet dg okpik’s second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures.
Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a Shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.
Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a Shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.
80 pages, Paperback
First published September 6, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
January 24, 2023
okpik is probably the leading contemporary Inuit poet, and blood snow demonstrates why. Like Arthur Sze, who she namechecks in a dedication, she's got a complex sense of the interaction of perspective, cultural heritage, scientific environmentalism, and a natural world in which animals are every bit as central as humans. There's a brooding sense of anthropocentric destruction hanging over the poems, many of which cast bears, birds and whales adrift, at times literally. I found myself struggling to keep the rhythms, but I'll revisit many of the poems, among them "Early Morning Sky Blue Pink," "Petrified Melt," "A Necklaced Whalebone," "Whiteout Polar Bears," "Song of Blood Mosquito Dance," "Skinny Boned Bear," and "Warm Water Fish Moving In."
November 8, 2022
Really, I need to sit with this book for a lot longer before commenting as, like dg okpik's previous collection, corpse whale, these poems don't give up their meaning easily. Her command of language and image remains unlike anyone else writing in the English language today, and her poems have a habit of sticking in the mind. Amongst stark and beautiful wild landscapes slowly being eroded by climate change, okpik's speakers experience climate change, death, illness, grief, the disrupted cycles of nature and the natural. Certainly my poetry book of the year.
February 10, 2023
I loved this poetry collection. I have never read a collection of poems that discussed the erasing and the policies that America created in erasing and eradicating Native lands from the physical ground level. And using that ground level to talk about a series of species slow extinction are the causation of American toxic policies.
February 7, 2023
A beautiful book. DG has a mesmerising way of blending color, landscape, plant & animal life, environmental destruction, horror & beauty in a way that perfectly encounters the anthropocene in a poetic space
April 2, 2024
17 Oct 2022
B.A. Van Sise for the New York Journal of Books
Alfred Hitchcock, for his films of often understated horror, preferred a certain type: His movies were populated almost entirely by coolly elegant blonde actresses who, in spite of their aristocratic bearing and good looks, seemed always to be plagued by odder troubles: Janet Leigh’s misadventurous hotel stay. Tippi Hedren’s sexualized attic romp with flocks of birds that would’ve given Leda a run for her money.
“Blondes,” Hitchcock famously (and creepily) said, “make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”
For most of the non-tropical segment of humanity, snow is the hourglass of our years—the annual reminder of our orb’s turn around the sun. Snow tells us that one of our few summers has passed, but that another is coming. And it has different appreciations for different people: for the city dweller, snow is blight in traffic. But out in the country, it’s manna to the hunter: It hides what is but puts into neon relief what was. The hoofprints of the beast that went thataway, the crimson splatter silhouette of the seal that fell beneath the clobber.
It is fitting, then, that Okpik has put together a book about snow, the melting marker of our seasons, that in the Iñupiaq Alaska of her forebears forms land in months of darkness and melts to rivers, their currents ever-changing, when it melts for months of ever-noon.
There is a renaissance, right now, for Native culture in this country, a minor balm for centuries of wounds. What had once been a punchline—”Eskimo poetry” having been a campaign joke on the TV show West Wing and the many words for snow a canard of every home in Leave-it-to-Beaverland for decades—is finally being given the consideration worthy of dozens of cultures boasting thousands of years of accumulated language that had been as pure as bloodless snow.
It is finally the time, instead, for poetry.
Poets are in common practice often (near always) classed with writers, a definition neither seems much to mind but which remains, nevertheless, fairly erroneous. There is a painterly aspect to the storytelling of the contemporary poet, and Okpik—who takes huge gestures from the downright impressionist Arthur Sze who mentored her—is no exception. What she paints in blood snow is a world of both natural and manmade creation.
It is common enough for poets—or anybody, really—to bring the outside world into the one we’ve been forged in. It’s easy to reheat the warmth of the womb with the microwave of our environs. But here Okpik does the opposite—instead bringing her native Alaska to the bustling, bristling world, infusing steel with bark and frost-flowers and, yes, snow. It is a contemporary work largely unmarked by pastiche, an ambassadorial effort in which, no matter how alien the terrain might be, the native laws exist within its walls.
And what are those laws? This has always been a continent of two competing systems: at the forefront, settlers’ laws are made by men and quills; present in the background, but unforgotten, Native laws made of rivers, mountains, and land. And also more: things that don’t always seem clear. Things that don’t always make sense.
In Blood Snow, Okpik walks the narrow border between opposing nations of opposing laws. providing structurally interesting abstracts of the changing frontiers of modern life: where man and machinery meet, where all the carbon-things of life, from moss on up, can find community.
At times, those laws are broken: Iñupiaq language is dusted liberally throughout the text entirely without explanation, but why should it be explained? Why should it be clarified? After all, for three centuries no apology has been made for the unexplained intrusion of English on Iñupiaq. Now, in a resurgence of interest in Native cultures and a revitalization of Native languages, the snow begins to melt. The current is always changing.
“I have died so many midnight moons,” says the living Okpik. “To learn you must be open, diligent, and willing to be an individual,” she writes, suggesting Sze’s teaching once again, ceding some of that individuality. Does Blood Snow sometimes contradict itself? Yes. Does it always make sense? No. But the same things could be said of life, especially Native life, in America.
It is a masterful book of poetry, light in the hand and heavy in the heart. It is easy to read: the pages unravel as smoothly as balls of string. It’s exceptional in what it says, the poet constructing a simultaneously conflict-filled and congruous modern world stand holds a veil between two cultures and four centuries, but also between nature and everything that threatens it. It is more remarkable, perhaps, in the empty pauses she offers to let the empty room speak for her.
“Ice Age Two” opens with a Barry Lopez quote:
“Eskimo women
sat on driftwood logs.
What they dreaded:”
that it leaves unanswered, because it needs not. Okpik has let you know, through page after page of unraveled poetry, the answer long in advance.
“In numbness I wake then
mumble you’re part of me
now leave.”
Okpik writes. The things that are disappearing, the unstated everything, are as present as anything you can see in the many paintings left on the page, the portraits of ancestors but also—in a view of altered modernity—their many descendants yet unborn.
The snow, marked by blood as it is, hardens every year. And melts once a year to follow the law of the lands; here, it flows past a world where women are igneous rock and men are milkweed and everyone can be a fish if the need arises. And it will. After all, the currents are always changing.
B.A. Van Sise for the New York Journal of Books
Alfred Hitchcock, for his films of often understated horror, preferred a certain type: His movies were populated almost entirely by coolly elegant blonde actresses who, in spite of their aristocratic bearing and good looks, seemed always to be plagued by odder troubles: Janet Leigh’s misadventurous hotel stay. Tippi Hedren’s sexualized attic romp with flocks of birds that would’ve given Leda a run for her money.
“Blondes,” Hitchcock famously (and creepily) said, “make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”
For most of the non-tropical segment of humanity, snow is the hourglass of our years—the annual reminder of our orb’s turn around the sun. Snow tells us that one of our few summers has passed, but that another is coming. And it has different appreciations for different people: for the city dweller, snow is blight in traffic. But out in the country, it’s manna to the hunter: It hides what is but puts into neon relief what was. The hoofprints of the beast that went thataway, the crimson splatter silhouette of the seal that fell beneath the clobber.
It is fitting, then, that Okpik has put together a book about snow, the melting marker of our seasons, that in the Iñupiaq Alaska of her forebears forms land in months of darkness and melts to rivers, their currents ever-changing, when it melts for months of ever-noon.
There is a renaissance, right now, for Native culture in this country, a minor balm for centuries of wounds. What had once been a punchline—”Eskimo poetry” having been a campaign joke on the TV show West Wing and the many words for snow a canard of every home in Leave-it-to-Beaverland for decades—is finally being given the consideration worthy of dozens of cultures boasting thousands of years of accumulated language that had been as pure as bloodless snow.
It is finally the time, instead, for poetry.
Poets are in common practice often (near always) classed with writers, a definition neither seems much to mind but which remains, nevertheless, fairly erroneous. There is a painterly aspect to the storytelling of the contemporary poet, and Okpik—who takes huge gestures from the downright impressionist Arthur Sze who mentored her—is no exception. What she paints in blood snow is a world of both natural and manmade creation.
It is common enough for poets—or anybody, really—to bring the outside world into the one we’ve been forged in. It’s easy to reheat the warmth of the womb with the microwave of our environs. But here Okpik does the opposite—instead bringing her native Alaska to the bustling, bristling world, infusing steel with bark and frost-flowers and, yes, snow. It is a contemporary work largely unmarked by pastiche, an ambassadorial effort in which, no matter how alien the terrain might be, the native laws exist within its walls.
And what are those laws? This has always been a continent of two competing systems: at the forefront, settlers’ laws are made by men and quills; present in the background, but unforgotten, Native laws made of rivers, mountains, and land. And also more: things that don’t always seem clear. Things that don’t always make sense.
In Blood Snow, Okpik walks the narrow border between opposing nations of opposing laws. providing structurally interesting abstracts of the changing frontiers of modern life: where man and machinery meet, where all the carbon-things of life, from moss on up, can find community.
At times, those laws are broken: Iñupiaq language is dusted liberally throughout the text entirely without explanation, but why should it be explained? Why should it be clarified? After all, for three centuries no apology has been made for the unexplained intrusion of English on Iñupiaq. Now, in a resurgence of interest in Native cultures and a revitalization of Native languages, the snow begins to melt. The current is always changing.
“I have died so many midnight moons,” says the living Okpik. “To learn you must be open, diligent, and willing to be an individual,” she writes, suggesting Sze’s teaching once again, ceding some of that individuality. Does Blood Snow sometimes contradict itself? Yes. Does it always make sense? No. But the same things could be said of life, especially Native life, in America.
It is a masterful book of poetry, light in the hand and heavy in the heart. It is easy to read: the pages unravel as smoothly as balls of string. It’s exceptional in what it says, the poet constructing a simultaneously conflict-filled and congruous modern world stand holds a veil between two cultures and four centuries, but also between nature and everything that threatens it. It is more remarkable, perhaps, in the empty pauses she offers to let the empty room speak for her.
“Ice Age Two” opens with a Barry Lopez quote:
“Eskimo women
sat on driftwood logs.
What they dreaded:”
that it leaves unanswered, because it needs not. Okpik has let you know, through page after page of unraveled poetry, the answer long in advance.
“In numbness I wake then
mumble you’re part of me
now leave.”
Okpik writes. The things that are disappearing, the unstated everything, are as present as anything you can see in the many paintings left on the page, the portraits of ancestors but also—in a view of altered modernity—their many descendants yet unborn.
The snow, marked by blood as it is, hardens every year. And melts once a year to follow the law of the lands; here, it flows past a world where women are igneous rock and men are milkweed and everyone can be a fish if the need arises. And it will. After all, the currents are always changing.
January 4, 2023
Rounded up from 4.5. This was an amazing book to read as we moved into an unseasonably warm 2023; okpik’s elliptical, emblodiminded and yet intersubjective poems provide a cathartic exploration of climate disaster. Moving in and through identification with the birds, bears, and walruses that people the Far North, she explores isolation and forced migration under ongoing settler colonial violence. As the world crashes horribly into socio-environmental devastation, blood snow seems to stop the clock, if only for a second, to observe the bloody whiteness we walk through.
December 5, 2022
Anthropocene Years
Here Cape Lisburne
Or maybe not there.
Kaktovik then
on New Siberian Islands.
Here not here.
Elsewhere but not anywhere.
But somewhere like Cape Chelynskin;
or White Island; yes, set the route due north.
As my compass taps out of bearing in circles.
Here Novaya Zemlya. A gyroscope.
Here on the boreal island, Norway.
Wherever it is it’s warm.
Here choking on acidic air.
Here Greenland, Jan Mayen.
No it’s Disko.
Here Canada.
Baffin Island.
Grinnell Lake.
Minto Inlet.
Place fogged lenses on telescopic eyes.
Here brilliant colors of pollution so high.
Here in the melt sun, heaving waters of ocean and sea.
Here start ending double-rate heat to sweat & yet, not yet.
Here wake-up there not here.
Here Cape Lisburne
Or maybe not there.
Kaktovik then
on New Siberian Islands.
Here not here.
Elsewhere but not anywhere.
But somewhere like Cape Chelynskin;
or White Island; yes, set the route due north.
As my compass taps out of bearing in circles.
Here Novaya Zemlya. A gyroscope.
Here on the boreal island, Norway.
Wherever it is it’s warm.
Here choking on acidic air.
Here Greenland, Jan Mayen.
No it’s Disko.
Here Canada.
Baffin Island.
Grinnell Lake.
Minto Inlet.
Place fogged lenses on telescopic eyes.
Here brilliant colors of pollution so high.
Here in the melt sun, heaving waters of ocean and sea.
Here start ending double-rate heat to sweat & yet, not yet.
Here wake-up there not here.
August 9, 2024
As I was reading this collection, I sensed the voice of someone who is adopted. That okpik is able to catch so much of traditional Inupiaq life living in the urban environment revealed the tremendous power she has of living beyond the particular place and time in which one finds herself. I later learned she was indeed adopted, but not taken so far away as to not have some reinforcement of the more northerly life while in Anchorage. She is able to transcend to another place and to go back and forth in time like many writers do, but she has a finely honed feeling of having lived in the traditional Inupiaq life. This collection is a lament for what she sees happening to the land and sea as much as for her personal rupture.
March 24, 2023
The poems in Blood Snow give voice to a land/ocean under threat, ill, and desecrated. The speaker fluctuates from being in that land/ocean to becoming it and/or its inhabitants, animate as well as inanimate, often within the same poem. While present time clearly seems to be running out for the poems' ecosystem, speaker/s and the reader, their sequence creates a space comprising all time, outside this imminence, almost sacred though not inviolate. They're mostly one-page long, include a haibun-like series, use alliteration and other sound (and image) echoes beautifully, and have a beat I simply loved to fall into.
April 7, 2024
dg nanouk okpik, Blood snow. Wave Books
“A toil of one inside me: / She/I cast a thick, / sod-wall / time out of mind, / out of sync, off course.”
"The morning dream in a distance, an inukshuk,
young-old-women of igneous rock standing
at rest, tall and safe. In the sunglow I roll
a handful of ice silt clay, roll it in my hands until
they’re red-rose red—I don’t let them bleed….
My eyes flow, eyes of tears to the angels & archangels,
as I make wet, dry, warm, cold & fire flame. I’m off kilter.”
From https://www.southeastreview.org/singl...
“Use of pronouns, the symbolic meaning of the “I” of the poems, helps me open the poetry to new curves or slant writing to appeal to the reader, to draw them in in a physical way, to present the internal strife of one, me, she/I, mind. Especially, the “we” instead of the “I” is represented as an Inupiaq way of thinking.
Then the external world is given by metaphorical language such as boundaries. Sod walls create a sense of border, then the complications and tensions mount when the mind (internal) changes. Change is presented in an altered state of mind, which creates space for fragmentation. There is no ego. There is a transformation going on with the internal and external language. So urgent is the writing, but these times require the urgency of language.”
“my diction is a composite of these travels”
“I have the ethos of water in all its many roles/forms to create fluidity.”
“A toil of one inside me: / She/I cast a thick, / sod-wall / time out of mind, / out of sync, off course.”
"The morning dream in a distance, an inukshuk,
young-old-women of igneous rock standing
at rest, tall and safe. In the sunglow I roll
a handful of ice silt clay, roll it in my hands until
they’re red-rose red—I don’t let them bleed….
My eyes flow, eyes of tears to the angels & archangels,
as I make wet, dry, warm, cold & fire flame. I’m off kilter.”
From https://www.southeastreview.org/singl...
“Use of pronouns, the symbolic meaning of the “I” of the poems, helps me open the poetry to new curves or slant writing to appeal to the reader, to draw them in in a physical way, to present the internal strife of one, me, she/I, mind. Especially, the “we” instead of the “I” is represented as an Inupiaq way of thinking.
Then the external world is given by metaphorical language such as boundaries. Sod walls create a sense of border, then the complications and tensions mount when the mind (internal) changes. Change is presented in an altered state of mind, which creates space for fragmentation. There is no ego. There is a transformation going on with the internal and external language. So urgent is the writing, but these times require the urgency of language.”
“my diction is a composite of these travels”
“I have the ethos of water in all its many roles/forms to create fluidity.”
Read
June 20, 2024Not going to rate these. Most of these flew over my head like a white raven. The imagery was consistently beautiful, often startling. Some cool devices, too - she/I as a kind of collectivism that also merged with animals and spirits. Anyway, I can't say I enjoyed these as it felt like reading a language I have not been taught, but regardless, interesting.
July 24, 2023
Although I really enjoyed some of the poems here, still some were a bit of a disappointment. Often the poems just felt like a list of things and place names. I miss emotion and something here to move me.
April 29, 2023
Had to read this in class and will read it again soon!!
June 30, 2023
A glorious collection, full of mystery and myth and care. I loved every poem. Will definitely reread.
December 27, 2023
Sorry, Santee.
January 29, 2024
“In here, I peel off a bony cast
on my head & the temporary loss
of my soul person lives freely.”
Thought-provoking, provocative, fascinating poems
on my head & the temporary loss
of my soul person lives freely.”
Thought-provoking, provocative, fascinating poems
March 12, 2024
i don’t remember one thing but i liked it all
December 28, 2023
This Pulitzer Prize book of poetry tells a story about a homeland, Alaska, under erasure, erosion and climate change and man induced methane induced issues including ice floes and rising temperatures. She has a deep understanding of animals, people, traditions, histories, ancestors, and identities.
Her home is in Anchorage Alaska, a place of wondrous natural beauty. She describes this and the devastation of Alaskan native nations and landscapes and its incomparable beauty in an awesome way with these poems. They need to be read slowly and ingested to be appreciated
Her home is in Anchorage Alaska, a place of wondrous natural beauty. She describes this and the devastation of Alaskan native nations and landscapes and its incomparable beauty in an awesome way with these poems. They need to be read slowly and ingested to be appreciated
August 3, 2024
Immersive, challenging, essential, and with images that stay with me. Think of the mosquitos and the speaker surrendering her body to them, for a time. Think of all the ways the color blue appears and reappears throughout the collection. No wonder this book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist!
Read my full formal review here: https://www.poetrynw.org/multispecies...
One favorite excerpt from okpik's collection, in the poem "Confluence":
I am human: an ego-syntonic woman;
water; I am contradiction, water & blood
on a page of words joining; meeting; in union;
a collision of squid ink; salmon & paper.
Read my full formal review here: https://www.poetrynw.org/multispecies...
One favorite excerpt from okpik's collection, in the poem "Confluence":
I am human: an ego-syntonic woman;
water; I am contradiction, water & blood
on a page of words joining; meeting; in union;
a collision of squid ink; salmon & paper.
August 30, 2023
There is a haunting tone to this collection of poems that express the extinction of a way of life; that line that is crossed which is the point of no return. There is also a strong religious undercurrent to this work: a thread of existence that is being broken that holds everything together. Inupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik has connected with the past - to a present - that is denied a future. Highest recommendation.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews