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 Anthology and Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic. A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow, Shelley Memorial Award winner, 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.

This book of poems is a writerly text that welcomes active participation from the reader; it is not a passive and consumptive experience but an exercise of semantic and syntactical calisthenics that stretches this reader's habits of reading and meaning making. It is disorienting to find one's footing in Kane's literary landscape that is vast and expansive, but the compass for the reader is an open curiosity and willingness to explore, to be with language in a new way.