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:	9780822982463
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/30/2017
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	2 MB

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

Contents Iridin Salvage Phase At Bay All Night Long I Am Narrowing Headline News An Other Lethe Incognitum (in the Indian Hall) Exhibits from the Dark Museum Inuŋuaq The Dolls Vanishing Point Give or Take a Century Late Successional Epithalamia Taktugziun Compass The Incident Light In Its Mouth Little Air A Few Lines for Jordin Tootoo Update on J Glare in Blue When the World Was Milk Song Assiraġia I Am Copying Him Point Transience Human Heart Toponymic Savak Aŋmaiga / I Opened the Door Earnings Statement Georgic Peripheral Vision Stemmata The Straits Held The Mother of All Ugiuvak More Dissipate Bone Mineral The Unnamed Child A Wall Collapsed Up the Mountain Aspirational Phase Arboretum Americanum Metabole Hearth He Burnt To Live Beyond Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

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 Forche

“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