Inupiat

American Book Award–winning poet dg okpik’s 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, dg 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.

Reviews
"Unlike poets who adopt cultures into which they weren't born, or raised, okpik, who has fished the waters of which she writes so eloquently, has something rare these days: an authentic voice, one that nets ancient beliefs without discarding modern science or the daily news."—Poetica

Additional Information
96 pages | 7.19" x 9.00" | Paperback 

In September 1921, a young Inupiat woman named Ada Blackjack traveled to Wrangel Island, 200 miles off the Arctic Coast of Siberia, as a cook and seamstress, along with four professional explorers. The expedition did not go as planned. When a rescue ship finally broke through the ice two years later, she was the only survivor.

Diane Glancy discovered Blackjack’s diary in the Dartmouth archives and created a new narrative based on the historical record and her vision of this woman’s extraordinary life. She tells the story of a woman facing danger, loss, and unimaginable hardship, yet surviving against the odds where four “experts” could not. Beyond the expedition, the story examines Blackjack’s childhood experiences at an Indian residential school, her struggles as a mother and wife, and the faith that enabled her to survive alone on a remote island in the Arctic Sea.

Glancy’s creative telling of this heroic tale is a high mark in her award-winning hybrid investigations of suffering, identity, and Native American history.

Reviews
“This is not a reconstruction; it is symbiosis as an act of respect and dignity. As Diane Glancy 'ventriloquizes' Ada into a truth of words—written, typed, spoken, thought—she speaks the paradoxical truth of acts of writing as self-witness: 'I am hurting when I am writing.’ Isolation becomes revelation. The spiritual driftwood becomes a testament of sacred connection and a claiming back of voice.”—John Kinsella

“The shifting of ice. Written letters become elk, an orange is a moon, an owl is a blank page, and the stunning survival in this Arctic landscape redefines the question, “What is rescue?” Diane Glancy hears the spirits, the words beneath the words. She knows the language of scars as she honors the life of Ada Blackjack in this visionary telling of the moving world.”—Jan Beatty

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128 pages | 5.50" x 8.25" | Paperback