Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo), Alaska, whose most recent book, Dark Traffic, was a finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts poetry award. A Guggenheim Fellow , she’s recently served as faculty at Harvard, Tufts, and elsewhere, and was founding faculty of the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Currently raising her children as a single mother in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Kane is an editor, writer, and collaborator for the Finland-based Mediated Arctic Geographies interdisciplinary literary, critical, and cultural collective and its affiliated projects.
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The Cormorant Hunter's WifePoemsFrom"The Designation"
I live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It’s become a bewilderment of white –
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.
The Cormorant Hunter's Wife:Poems -
The Cormorant Hunter's WifePoemsFrom"Building the Boats"
Yellow-lit beneath stretched
Skins, we play at bones,
Dig for ocher from clayey soil
To stain puffin bills for dance mitts.
They redly shake the sound of rain.
Downriver, cords of light hum,
Tobacco-smoked and hung
With salmon. Intervals of storm
Wash logs along the red-sanded
Shore before the tailing:
These you cut and steam,
Bend for frames.
The Cormorant Hunter's Wife:Poems -
The Cormorant Hunter's WifePoemsFrom"The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife"
Black birds luster in sleep above a rough
Sea, and he is all suspension from a length
Of rope before descending to snap ten
Long necks, one after another. Cormorants
In death are just lustrous: swollen from a day’s
Plunging, distended with fish. He wants
To own his weighty bounty upwards,
But she in cunning cuts his cord and turns
To the other in her husband’s falling.
Implausible travels from a scar of rock,
And a return that needs no telling.
Is it her failing: the cormorants hunter’s wife
Feels no ill will all winter until the spring,
When, in a glutton’s plumpness with her black
Hair lustered, he buries her beneath a sum of stones
And himself plunges with the downdrafts under.
The Cormorant Hunter's Wife:Poems
"The poems of Joan Naviyuk Kane are lyrical blasts from a far northern landscape of history and myth." —The New York Times
"Quiet but never silent, Hyperboreal embodies the landscape it seeks to represent. Through observation and lived experience, these poems are indicative of an ever-watched and yet not always understood world. Here there is existence where humans are only a fragment." —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife is a groundbreaking collection of poems made of one long breath. The breath is enough to carry you the distance it takes to fly to the moon and return in one long winter night. I have been looking for the return of such a poet. Joan Kane crafts poems as meticulous as snowflakes. She is visionary and the poems carry this vision with solid grace.” —Joy Harjo
Selected Works
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