Blood Snow

(Paperback)

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Listed inThe Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2022
Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry

American Book Awardwinning poet dg okpiks 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 okpiks 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 Shamans omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpiks 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, okpiks poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how ones existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.

Reviews

"Fearless in her craft, okpik brings an experimental, yet poignant, hybrid aesthetic to her first book, making it truly one of a kind."--University of Arizona Press

"In a multiplicity of presence the poet watches her other move through time, enacting these stories as the months turn and turn again, renewed and ancient in their language."--Eleni Siklians, author of Body Clock

"Unlike poets who adopt cultures into which they weren't born, or raised, okpik, who has fished the waters of which she writes so eloquently, has something rare these days: an authentic voice, one that nets ancient beliefs without discarding modern science or the daily news."--Poetica

Author Bio

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).