Joan Naviyuk Kane
is the author of seven collections of poetry and prose, most recently
Another Bright Departure (
CutBank, 2019). She is the 2019-2020 Hilles Bush Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, and a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award Winner for her 2009 poetry debut,
The Cormorant Hunter's Wife
. She graduated from Harvard College and received her MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts.
“Kane creates an earth on which all things are evidently their own opposites, endless and utterly bereft. These poems are catchy and thrilling and expose the violence of time and, inside it, our human vibrancy and violence. Every line—every word—is unexpected and exactly right. An encapsulation of a white landscape that bursts its capsule and gleams a thousand hues.”
–Jennifer Croft (author of
Homesick
, translator of
Flights
and
The Book of Jacob
by Olga Tokarczuk, winner of 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature)
“The poems of Joan Naviyuk Kane are lyrical blasts from a far northern landscape of history and myth.”
—
New York Times
“What is at stake in
'Hyperboreal'
is not only the threat of 'cultural and biological extinction' faced by the Inupiaq people of Alaska, but also the contested place of the human in that landscape and more particularly, the lyric subject. Kane questions its customary property (which is loss) and its dream of deliverance from extinction through craft. . . In this book, we are never far from the prospective end of a line of human beings, if not the extinction of the landscape.”
—
Boston Review
Santee Frazier
received his BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and his MFA from Syracuse University. Frazier is director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA Program. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He is the author of
Dark Thirty
(2009) and
Aurum
(2019) from the University of Arizona Press.
Aurum
’s
lyric setting provokes narrative, as in the poems “Lode” and “Half-Life,” just as they enact metaphoric processs, as in “Matins,” where “the yonder is burnt orange.” We are given the mangled poems, and language, and density—then density of language, of meaning, and relation. Thus, Frazier’s poetic indigeneity is neither framed nor calibrated in a rote or calculated way: of course not. Its concerns cadences surpass those of mere decipherment of the tale.
Aurum
is extraordinary. It changes the language that its readers may speak.
Jake Skeets
is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
, a National Poetry Series-winning collection of poems. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/
Boston Review
Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called
Cloudthroat
and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona. Jake Skeets’ metamorphic debut,
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
, replete with poems of depth, musicality, clarity, and associative through-lines, brings its readers towards real and credible meaning. These poems insist upon harbor, limbus, nettle: as in “American Bar,” when we are reminded that it is “such a terrible beauty to find ourselves beneath things.” As in “Drunktown,” when we are given the rupture into experience: “In between letters are boots crushing tumbleweeds, / a tractor tire backing over a man’s skull.” As in “Let There Be Coal,” when we begin to perceive that “no light comes, just dust cloud / glitterblack.” Skeets’ poems deserve every celebration and rumination; this, as in his work, is irrefutable.
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