dg nanouk okpik

This book was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize!

I had no idea when I picked this up at the library. I was just scrolling the stacks and was intrigued by the name, and then Okpik's bio: being Indigenous and growing up in Anchorage, convinced me to put it in my towering check-out pile.

It took me a bit to get into this collection, mostly because I was frustrated by all the things I felt I wasn't getting. I wanted to be more familiar with Alaskan wildlife, with Inupiaq culture. But once I show more let that go it was clear there is so much here in offer without that insider knowledge. Primarily this collection exists in the tension between celebrating nature and the stark observations of our destruction of it: climate change, trash, alienation from Native ways. It emphasizes the connection of all things, from use of she/I as a pronoun to sometimes taking on the persona of a mosquito, a polar bear, a flounder. To drive the poem home one poem is told first with the narrator as a polar bear, then, much later, retold as an observer of that polar bear, neck-snapped. In many poems illness appears, in a few explicitly named as cancer.

From "Spring Thaw"

As if my body -
subdued
by brittle, gutter, brim
ice. Finding a chickadee's
feather on a snowflake,
while lost in slumberous,
smooth, blue, smoke.

Recommended for fans of Indigenous poetry, climate poetry, poetry infused with myth and the natural world. show less