• books

    book cover of  Ex Machina

    Ex Machina

    2023

    The poems in Ex Machina are their own beings. Full of muscle, grief, and rage, they speak of and for themselves. Within them, words are physical manifestations of what they name— clubmoss, sea lovage, fish roe, fox —not metaphor "but drum / but map.” Inside violent loss, these poems are less interested in mere survival as they are in embodied, languaged sovereignty. The language of these poems “reminds us / to create a story and to become part of it, / to stay alive until we come back.” I found myself coming back again and again to meet Joan Naviyuk's work on its own terms, to learn from it, and to let myself be transformed in the quiet storm created on the page.

    Tamiko Beyer

     

     

    Is a poem a refuge, or a reckoning? A weapon, or a dream? In the captivating brilliance of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s poetry, it is the relationship among these things—a net in which one can listen through the darkness to something “hard to reach / & harder to escape.” And Kane’s Ex Machina is not a net we should want to escape, being reminded, in it, how “to stay alive until we come back”— reminded that, in a syntax that refuses the limits of a life across that disappearing land there walks the poet, searching for sky. Suspended as both an island and its harbor, this is a work of courage, vulnerability, and fierce precision.

    —Jennifer Elise Foerster

     

     

    To enter Ex Machina is to be immersed in a lyric archipelago of sovereign intellect and affective resonance where “language creates its own tension.” These poems alchemize the seemingly unbridgeable distance between ouroboric grief and the forces that would subject it to a delimiting notion of love, which is to say capture without release. Relational threads of the nonhuman—fireweed, cormorant, fish roe, sourgrass, sea lovage, “earless seals,” “the voluble insinuations of the river,” ukpeaġvik—compose a lucent catalogue that accretes and concatenates across the dreamscape of these pages. Whenever I enter a poem by Joan Naviuk Kane, I enter a dream that I never want to end.

    —Liz Howard

     

     

    There is such beautiful ferocity within these poems, a fight the speaker won’t back down from. Pulling us into the storm of being “as you skin my throat and make me bleed, as I funnel gas into a skiff as if —as if at sea” she brings us into the tempest. And as you move through the landscape here, often cold and biting, there is a sense of solitude. “I will look through a darkness I could have walked through alone.” Solitude is different than loneliness, and these poems speak to the strength and the boldness of self. Ex Machina shows the granite and the armor that is inherent in survival. Joan Naviyuk Kane’s poems are questioning the atmosphere around her, as she moves through a broken world taking inventory, taking names, demanding something more, something better. Like storms when they break there is light to be found within, and she guides us through the darkness and into, “Someplace we can travel back to together if we have to, if we make it through these days.”
    Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe

     

     

    Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Ex Machina holds, at its intimate center, a woman unmoored, a “man-shaped hole in her brain.” These visceral, grief-blown poems resist both confession and intellectualization until heartache finds its haven in language: “Set adrift, I wanted to stay near the shore / of something familiar but instead I trace // the shape of tuqqayuk, sea lovage, wild / celery, with something other than my tongue.” Kane’s lyrical genius and matchless orchestration of words convert despair into a dance until “plunder, plunder” transforms into “plover.” We are lucky to witness the poet’s tenacity in the terror of “starting over, & over” until both she and we reach the place “where the language reminds us… to stay alive until we come back.”
    Eugenia Leigh

     

     

    "What could not be vulnerable in such changing / light?" asks Joan Naviyuk Kane's impeccable chapbook Ex Machina. The poems here are unsentimental and unsparing; they tell stories of theft, erosion, and silencing, and they detail the depths of connection across time and space and the wish "for the sorrow to become something islandic." These new poems of brutal insight and electric lexicon further cement Kane's status as one of the most important poets writing today.

    —Natalie Shapero

     

    In this world, language is invisible but it is also a raft and it is also clubmoss. Language is in the contour of shoreline, oil pool, freshwater ice, and whirlwind. In Ex Machina, language is held like a secret, close to the body, and pressed against earth itself. Joan Kane shows us the possibility of language as if language is an ocean. This world is built with deft patience, and a unique way of looking. It is a world we long for but one we also abandon. And, it turns out, the world in Ex Machina is actually our own and the language in this book is ours too—so much beauty, so much sky.
    Jake Skeets

     

    If the poet's work is to reveal, in all its grotesque convolutions, the emotional workings of human life–our motivations, regrets, celebrations, mournings–then Joan Naviyuk Kane is an expert technician, deep in the gut work and marking each turn with precise notation. Ex Machina is a (sometimes) lonely mapping of tangles, from knots "where language creates its own tension," to the deceiving dead-ends of human emotion. Where depletion lies, where land ends. And beyond, the sea and sounds of distance.

    Lehua M. Taitano

     

    The poems in “Ex Machina” hold a fire and ferocity, the language stripped by pounding storms to its rawest and most refined form. “Resiliency exhausts me:/ don’t want to be metaphor anymore,/ but drum, but map.” A beating sense of presence, a means of finding ways. These are poems of saplings, sorrel, peregrine falcons, fox, fireweed, rhubarb, sourdock, and ice. “There is nothing sentimental/ in this forest,” Kane writes. Instead, Kane, a Guggenheim recipient and Whiting Award winner, gives us a look at existence in its pure form, in the cold-burning whiteness of solitude. There is fury here, not inchoate, but harnessed and powerful.

     

    Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe June 9, 2023
     
    book cover of Dark Traffic

    2021

    Oscillating between presence and absence, mother, daughter, woman, inhabiting the "rift into language and grit," Kane reveals the ways we are made and unmade and made again. Dark Traffic is the poet at her most vulnerable—and most powerful.

    —Abigail Chabitnoy

     

    A brutal and beautiful book whose poems strain the lyric through concrete and confessional modes, translation, and unforgettable evocations of land and people burdened with—but not defined by—the legacies of colonial atrocity. Dark Traffic is a ravishing achievement—one of our best poets, at the height of her powers.

    —Melissa Febos

     

    Whether by intellect shot through with feeling, or feeling sharp with intellect, Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Dark Traffic is a vigorous account of [Cold War] communication systems, complicity, and [self] inquiry. Rich with experimentation and a clear ethic of attentiveness, Dark Traffic is an indomitable, resonate book.

    —Shara Lessley

     

     

    Another Bright Departure cover

    Another Bright Departure

    2019

    **** me up, Joan Naviyuk Kane

    –Relentlessly Dragging Ted Hughes

    Sublingual cover

    Sublingual

    2018

    In Sublingual, Kane creates an earth on which all things are evidently their own opposites, endless and utterly bereft. These poems are catchy and thrilling and expose the violence of time and, inside it, our human vibrancy and violence. Every line—every word—is unexpected and exactly right. An encapsulation of a white landscape that bursts its capsule and gleams a thousand hues.

    –Jennifer Croft

     

    The poems in Joan Kane‘s SUBLINGUAL don’t flinch, display a fist. If a fist can be a heart and the arrow through it a pen. Kane’s images and language arrest and attest to a future, a present, a past that is melting against “vehement light.” There’s no need for fret or worry, however. However, it’s time to take note, to look back at what’s looking at you. Breathe these poems, be at mercy to the wind.

    –Bojan Louis

     

    Joan Kane‘s chapbook Sublingual dissolves under the tongue like a pill, a medicine that tastes like melting glaciers and displaced cultures, except it doesn’t solve, it only soothes, and it’s a complicated soothing, making distinctions been “stress puking” and “party puking,” which like the poems here enact a push-and-pull of modes: urgent warnings and sinuous meditations and letters to friends and fragments of stories. It’s a fresh introduction to this important and exciting poet’s work. In Sublingual, Joan Kane is an Arctic Rimbaud who sees images of vivid defeat and unlikely persistence, and “inflects them with purpose,” investigating “how many rules of the brute’s brutish language” she can “break in one poem,” pursuing dark passages and open waters, disappearing forests, with a head “in its fine blank way an original,” an adventuring Alice pursuing “what is left of the woods… what is left of me.”

    –Ed Skoog

    book cover of A Few Lines in the Manifest

    A Few Lines in the Manifest

    2018

    In Manifest, Kane, a poet from Anchorage and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow who is on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts, has written a four-part lyric essay about her Inupiaq family and their traditional home of King Island, in the Bering Sea.

     

    After Alaska achieved statehood in 1959, the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed the island's school and forced the children to be educated on the mainland. Without their children to help prepare for winter, adults and elders had no choice but to leave the island as well. Returning, even for a visit, isn't easily accomplished. Reading about it isn't easy, either, because Kane makes the experience intellectually and psychologically rigorous. The writing is somewhat frenetic and sometimes relentlessly fragmented; Kane often addresses the reader directly or makes other kinds of asides. The latter portions engage in a dialogue with Melville's Moby-Dick (and other classic texts), the meaning of which seems less relevant to a reader's understanding than the ability to absorb the linguistic kaleidoscope Kane employs.

    —Jennifer Levin

     

    Kane displays such an ease in her prose, able to twist and turn complexities across a rather large canvas, one I’m hoping might eventually be larger than the four pieces collected here. Through four interconnected essays, this collection very much explores the relationships between, as she suggests, culture, language and survival, and is an important conversation during an era that attempts to (or wishes to attempt to) engage with any kind of reconciliation.

     —Rob McClennan

    Milk Black Carbon book cover

    Milk Black Carbon

    2017

    The black ink of a strong, strong hand. A rare and real word-world, mind-muscled into serious relief, stopped into dream and meaning.
    —Olena Kalytiak Davis

     

    Milk Black Carbon is at once a brilliant work of lyric art and a decoding of knowledges written "in the dark cursive of a wolf / circling on sea ice." Kane’s is a vertiginous sensibility, chiseled into language in a precarious time, as the rising seas "rephrase us." She writes in English and Inupiaq Eskimo, toward a horizon of radical futurity, against nostalgia, with awareness that there is no turning back. This is a twenty-first-century poetry, urgent, necessary, and of its time.
    —Carolyn Forché

     

    Her latest book of poetry contains themes of motherhood and the relationships between land and peoples, and ever present is her unmatched mastery of form and language. . . . Unique to Milk Black Carbon is the palpable sense of urgency throughout the poems.
    —Jen Rose Smith

     

    book cover of The Straits

    The Straits

    2015

    Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island (Ugiuviak), Alaska, and her work reveals a hunger for the landscape, for a language embedded in the land and in the traditional lifeways of the people, her people, who have lived there. But Kane’s world extends beyond the boundaries of water and ice. The straits she navigates as a contemporary woman are churned by the pressures of multiple worlds. A Harvard graduate with a dazzling literary career, Kane writes with one foot in her cultural tradition and a second in the world of contemporary poetics. Her poems condense at the intersection of gender and race and power relations. With gorgeous, precisely honed language and arresting imagery, Kane interrogates love and displacement, identity and obligation, loss and home.

    —Summer Wood

    book cover of  Hyperboreal

    2013

    “Arnica nods heavy-headed on the bruised slope.” In these vivid, disturbing, and mysterious poems, written in English and Inupiaq, Joan Kane writes out of the landscape and language of the far north. Hyperboreal is situated at a threshold between cultures, between inner and outer worlds, and the poems are voiced with a “knife blade at the throat’s slight swell.” Her compelling vision is earned through a language that will dislocate in order to relocate and whose tonal shifts are exact and exacting.
    —Arthur Sze

     

     

    Kane’s lyric voice is terse, lapidary; each of these poems is, as John Taggart would have it, a “room for listening.” There is an immense and insistent stillness here, “From / the forest / the wind / has all revised” to the “dreams inlaid with rigid marrow.” These are songs of ‘intaction,' of that which endures, poised against “the / long fermata of dusk / and its promised repetition.”
    —G. C. Waldrep

     

     

    I am mesmerized by these poems, their sonorous pathways across time and place; how they absorb and let me linger awhile in their stark beauty. Joan Kane has created a genuine indigenous poetic, irreducible, a point of reorigination and new beginnings. Hyperboreal will be remembered and celebrated.
    —Sherwin Bitsui

    book cover of  The Cormorant Hunter's Wife (1st edition)

    The Cormorant Hunter's Wife

    2009

    These poems are much more than verbal constructs, though their language alone is enough to keep you reading. Joan Kane’s mind spends much time with itself; her eye sees itself as part of the landscape, which in this collection is meticulously rendered, “a bewilderment of white.” She does not find metaphors for life in the wilderness, but rather observes patterns of nature that life bears out. Hers is a voice without cultural or self-reference, a voice without verbal-technics -- as rare and stark as the main climatic idiosyncrasy of these poems, “a year of two winters.”

    —Priscilla Becker

     

    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

     

    These poems are original, unsentimental, plain, and mysterious. There is something of Lorine Niedecker’s Wisconsin, and something of Willa Cather’s Nebraska or New Mexico in Joan Kane’s Alaska. And something more, “on the border of speech,” which yet gives us a new sense -- or maybe retrieves an old sense-- of experience. Sometimes, in these poems, description, and what we cannot quite find words for, underneath it, are enough; in fact, more than we would have known how to ask for: a lost people -- a shaman’s voice -- the voice of a glacier -- of a shell? “In a room in which you’re found at every margin / Forgetting you is nothing but a long discipline.”

    —Jean Valentine

  • about

    Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo), Alaska. Ex Machina (2023) follows The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), The Straits (2015), Milk Black Carbon (2017), Sublingual (2018), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018), Another Bright Departure (2019) and Dark Traffic (2021). Forthcoming is a full-length essay collection, Passing Through Danger, and the co-edited literary and visual multigenre anthology Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic. Kane also co-edited the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology, for which she served as a judge. Kane has been the recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, the National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, the United States Artists Foundation Creative Vision Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Mellon Practitioner Fellowship in Race and Ethnicity at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, multiple Individual Artist awards & Artist Fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation, and residencies with the School for Advanced Research, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Lannan Foundation, Millay Arts and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. The 2023 recipient of the Paul Engle Prize from Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature and a 2023-2026 Fulbright Specialist, she has held faculty appointments in the department of English at Harvard University, in the department of English at Tufts University and elsewhere. She has also served as a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University, teaching courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies. At Scripps College, she was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism. She's raised her children as a single mother in Alaska and Massachusetts, but now lives with them in Oregon, where she is currently an Associate Professor at Reed College.

    Her essays, poems, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, Before the Usual Time, Hick Poetics, The Hopkins Review, Yale Review, Salamander, FLAG + VOID, Thalia, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems, 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth Century Archive, Shapes of Native Nonfiction, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, Syncretism and Survival: A Forum on Poetics, HERE: Poems for the Planet, The Guardian, Orion, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Poetry International, Nat. Brut, West Branch, Territory, Drunken Boat, absent, Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World, American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, The Norton Reader, and elsewhere.

  • appearances

    1

    Academy of American Poets

    After Anchorage IV [...]

    2

    Hopkins Review

    Where to? / Naqmuŋaġataqpin? [...]

    3

    Rain Taxi

    "a warning that must be heeded if we are to survive as snow melts and ice cracks."

    [...]

    4

    Territory

    Seven poems from Dark Traffic [...]

    5

    terrain.org

    "I don’t know if this collection tells me about hope, but it offers art, an essential tool for survival" [...]

    6

    Yale Review

    Passing through danger [...]

    7

    Fearless Pursuits

    with Jim Cotter [...]

  • Contact

    Media inquiries &c

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    Please join us on 12 July 2022 online!

    FACEBOOK:

     

    https://fb.me/e/1Q5Ecqpsd

     

     

    YOUTUBE:

     

    https://youtu.be/JZlbN7K1uCY

     

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    KINDA ON MOST SOCIALS -- bluesky, instagram, threads -- AS @naviyuk

    not really, though

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    if you've scrolled this far, here's a lil proof that Milk Black Carbon made its way into the legendary Tantoo Cardinal's hands in Darlene Naponse's 2018 film Falls Around Her, a film that, by the way, you should watch in its entirety

  • DARK TRAFFIC

    was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2021

    The audio file for "Gray Eraser" was recorded on a layover in the Portland International Airport many years before Naviyuk moved there. If you're reading this far, first, get off the internet, and second, you might also find some archival stuff worth your time, maybe, like this one interview from All Things Considered. There's another from PBS Newshour. And something from the vault at High Country News, a relic of days gone by from the Anchorage Daily News, and maybe the first thing the Joan Kane ever published here. From time to time new, new-ish and old content, like links to a forsaken tumblr, will be posted to/removed from this site.