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Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize
Listed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2022
Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry
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, 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.
dg nanouk okpik was born and spent much of her life in Anchorage, Alaska. She graduated from Salish Kootenai College with an AFA in Liberal Arts and Liberal Studies, and later attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, graduating with an AFA and a BFA in Creative Writing before receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast College. okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Award, the May Sarton Award, and an American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012).
Contents
Forgrass
Choosing Inflorescence
Anthropocene Years
Early Morning Sky Blue Pink
Enforced Measures
Horizon at Duck Camp
Petrified Melt
A Glacial Oil World
Necklaced Whalebone
A Year Dot
Shaman Boy: Utqiagvik, Circa1878
Fate Map
Light Years of Humans
Spring Thaw
Hollow Hands
Whiteout Polar Bears
Ice Age Two
Polar Bear Lost
Man and the Little People
Fossil Fuel Embers
Frightening Acid Flakes
My Things
Twilight pain
In a Lock of Hair
Confluence
Crows Caw Echo Echo
It Cuts
NIL Ink & Paper
Mind Warp
Expedition Mars
Song of Blood Mosquito Dance
When the Mosquitoes Came
Found
I Want to Believe
Camouflage
Thrush’s Melody
Drum
Physical Thaw
Fuse
Dear Mommie, (I’m sick)
Skinny Boned Bear
Ernest’s Red Knots at Ikpikpuk River
Her New Moon Enigma
Atigiluk Armor
Warm Water Fish Moving In
When White Hawks Come
She Travels
Grave Posts
Oil Energy & Natural Gas
Blood Snow at Cambridge Bay