Corpse Whale (Volume 73) (Sun Tracks) - Softcover

Okpik, Dg Nanouk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816526745 ISBN 13: 9780816526741

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2012

Synopsis

A self-proclaimed “vessel in which stories are told from time immemorial,” poet dg nanouk okpik seamlessly melds both traditional and contemporary narrative, setting her apart from her peers. The result is a collection of poems that are steeped in the perspective of an Inuit of the twenty-first century—a perspective that is fresh, vibrant, and rarely seen in contemporary poetics.

Fearless in her craft, okpik brings an experimental, yet poignant, hybrid aesthetic to her first book, making it truly one of a kind. “It takes all of us seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling to be one,” she says, embodying these words in her work. Every sense is amplified as the poems, carefully arranged, pull the reader into their worlds. While each poem stands on its own, they flow together throughout the collection into a single cohesive body.

The book quickly sets up its own rhythms, moving the reader through interior and exterior landscapes, dark and light, and other spaces both ecological and spiritual. These narrative, and often visionary, poems let the lives of animal species and the power of natural processes weave into the human psyche, and vice versa.

Okpik’s descriptive rhythms ground the reader in movement and music that transcend everyday logic and open up our hearts to the richness of meaning available in the interior and exterior worlds.

About this title

About the Author

dg nanouk okpik is a resident advisor at Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. Her poetry appears in the books Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, and Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas.

Reviews

In her captivating debut, Inuit poet okpik creates a world both prehistoric and contemporary, part boreal forest, part bestiary of the half-imagined, filled with caribou and rhubarb, mastodon tracks, snowberries, and demon flowers. Okpik litters this landscape with soda bottles and oil slicks and alludes to psychology and DNA, vital concerns for a poet who is so interested in ideas of historical space and self-identity. Perhaps for this reason, okpik’s speaker refers to herself always as “she/I,” a disorienting approach that results in less a hazy dream-state than a crisp hallucination encompassing the smoky spell of a mendicant’s intoxicant and the interrupting edges of cairn rocks and shark teeth. Okpik’s use of Inuit vocabulary and her gift for unconventional poetic arrangement on the page interweave to create a primordial cyberspace, a surreal world through which the estranged speaker navigates disintegrating glaciers, blue floes, white space. And there is always a human spirit underlying the ice and hiding between silver birch and elderberry, invoking her ancestry, steering by the polestar. --Diego Báez

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816526745
• ISBN 13: 9780816526741
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112