Milk Black Carbon

by Joan Naviyuk Kane

Overview

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details – motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic – negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822964513
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/25/2017
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq, with family from King Island (Ugiuvak) and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She is the author of The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, and Milk Black Carbon. In addition to serving as the 2021 Mary Routt Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism at Scripps College, she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the Department of English at Harvard University, is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, and is faculty in the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Table of Contents

Iridin 3

Salvage Phase 4

At Bay 6

All Night Long I Am Narrowing 7

Headline News 8

An Other Lethe 10

Incognitum (in the Indian Hall) 11

Exhibits from the Dark Museum 12

Inunuaq 13

The Dolls 14

Vanishing Point 15

Give or Take a Century 16

Late Successional 17

Epithalamia 19

Taktugziun 20

Compass 21

The Incident Light 22

In Its Mouth 24

Little Air 25

A Few Lines for Jordin Tootoo 26

Update on J 28

Glare in Blue 30

When the World Was Milk 31

Song 32

Assiragia 34

I Am Copying Him 35

Point Transience 36

Human Heart Toponymie 37

Savak Anmaiga / I Opened the Door 38

Earnings Statement 39

Georgic 41

Peripheral Vision 42

Stemmata 43

The Straits 44

Held 45

The Mother of All 46

Ugiuvak 49

More Dissipate 50

Bone Mineral 51

The Unnamed Child 52

A Wall Collapsed 53

Up the Mountain 54

Aspirational Phase 55

Arboretum Americanum 56

Metabole 58

Hearth He Burnt 59

To Live Beyond 60

Acknowledgments 63

Editorial Reviews

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 Forche

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

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

“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


“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


"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 

From the Publisher