with snow pouring southward past the window

Joan Naviyuk Kane is the author of the poetry collections The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, Milk Black Carbon, and Dark Traffic. Her edited volumes include The Griffin Poetry Prize 2017 Anthologyand Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic. A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow, Whiting Award winner, and Paul Engle Prize recipient, she’s a 2025 United States Artists Fellow based in Oregon, where she’s an associate professor at Reed College.

These poems move ferociously through landscapes of rupture, wielding exacting, rigorous vocabularies that feel scraped from the wary and hoarfrosted voice of a poet-seer who spares no bullshit: ‘No more I want to go home. No more I want to go into another time. No more want, just need.’ Kane’s word is urgent throughout, marked by an insistent naming of plants, people, places—an act of preservation against all that slips away: ‘gather them—my eyes are brimming with tears.’ Even as everything edges toward loss, this collection builds something lasting and vibrant: ‘for the sorrow to become something islandic. / Someplace we can travel back to together / if we have to, if we make it through these days.’This book will gut you and sweep you clean.