Abigail Chabitnoy – författare

In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful is a meditation on water, land, women, and violent environmental changes as they affect both the natural world and human migration. The poet reckons with the unsettling realities that women experience, questioning the cause and effect of events and asking why stories of oppression are so often simply accepted as the only stories. Alutiiq language is used throughout these poems that are in conversation with history, ancestors, and an uncertain future, in imagery that moves in waves, returning again and again to the ocean, and a deep visioning of the "current."

Elegy for a broken world and all it—we—might still become._x000D_/>_x000D_/>Love Like a Body Carried to Shore, from award-winning poet Abigail Chabitnoy, is an invitation to listen. This ecologically and emotionally charged collection explores continuity through water and weather, through the intimacies of relation, where knowing is a bodied verb. Moving with a tidal rhythm across its unsectioned form, the book weaves ancestral memory with myth. It stays with the work of environmental witness and extends its meditation to the permeability between human and animal. Domestic spaces blur with the mythic. The self emerges inside the landscape._x000D_/>_x000D_/>Engaging Indigenous and Judeo-Christian cosmologies, Chabitnoy reconfigures these frames into openings toward mutuality. Amid ecological and cultural precarity, the poems enact reclamation, seeking moments outside of causal time, where future catastrophe loosens its hold long enough for the body to remember what it is to love the world and be loved by it._x000D_/>_x000D_/>[sample poem]_x000D_/>_x000D_/>NOT A DRILL_x000D_/>_x000D_/>The berries were not _x000D_/>ripe we plucked and _x000D_/>burst on our tongues._x000D_/>_x000D_/>We bent low to thumb_x000D_/>each foreign body that_x000D_/>opened_x000D_/>_x000D_/>held our breath to _x000D_/>record erratics _x000D_/>glissading_x000D_/>from the mountains we _x000D_/>left standing_x000D_/> the sigh of icemelts_x000D_/>_x000D_/>the rust we smelled_x000D_/>already monument._x000D_/>_x000D_/>It was love we _x000D_/>pressed our fingers_x000D_/>through_x000D_/>the honeyed fungus _x000D_/>_x000D_/>love we let the _x000D_/>shallow rooted _x000D_/>spruce stand _x000D_/>where no one had need _x000D_/>_x000D_/>love we sang to _x000D_/>chase the bears _x000D_/>from the _x000D_/>brush _x000D_/>_x000D_/>we projected _x000D_/>on the iceberg _x000D_/>when the dark was _x000D_/>sufficient _x000D_/>_x000D_/>love we refrained _x000D_/>from throwing _x000D_/>stones at the_x000D_/>muddied lake. _x000D_/>_x000D_/>Sea weeding  _x000D_/>through green _x000D_/>it was love  _x000D_/>we did not pluck _x000D_/>the unsightly _x000D_/>growth  from the  _x000D_/>supple  _x000D_/>earth.

Elegy for a broken world and all it—we—might still become._x000D_/>_x000D_/>Love Like a Body Carried to Shore, from award-winning poet Abigail Chabitnoy, is an invitation to listen. This ecologically and emotionally charged collection explores continuity through water and weather, through the intimacies of relation, where knowing is a bodied verb. Moving with a tidal rhythm across its unsectioned form, the book weaves ancestral memory with myth. It stays with the work of environmental witness and extends its meditation to the permeability between human and animal. Domestic spaces blur with the mythic. The self emerges inside the landscape._x000D_/>_x000D_/>Engaging Indigenous and Judeo-Christian cosmologies, Chabitnoy reconfigures these frames into openings toward mutuality. Amid ecological and cultural precarity, the poems enact reclamation, seeking moments outside of causal time, where future catastrophe loosens its hold long enough for the body to remember what it is to love the world and be loved by it._x000D_/>_x000D_/>[sample poem]_x000D_/>_x000D_/>NOT A DRILL_x000D_/>_x000D_/>The berries were not _x000D_/>ripe we plucked and _x000D_/>burst on our tongues._x000D_/>_x000D_/>We bent low to thumb_x000D_/>each foreign body that_x000D_/>opened_x000D_/>_x000D_/>held our breath to _x000D_/>record erratics _x000D_/>glissading_x000D_/>from the mountains we _x000D_/>left standing_x000D_/> the sigh of icemelts_x000D_/>_x000D_/>the rust we smelled_x000D_/>already monument._x000D_/>_x000D_/>It was love we _x000D_/>pressed our fingers_x000D_/>through_x000D_/>the honeyed fungus _x000D_/>_x000D_/>love we let the _x000D_/>shallow rooted _x000D_/>spruce stand _x000D_/>where no one had need _x000D_/>_x000D_/>love we sang to _x000D_/>chase the bears _x000D_/>from the _x000D_/>brush _x000D_/>_x000D_/>we projected _x000D_/>on the iceberg _x000D_/>when the dark was _x000D_/>sufficient _x000D_/>_x000D_/>love we refrained _x000D_/>from throwing _x000D_/>stones at the_x000D_/>muddied lake. _x000D_/>_x000D_/>Sea weeding  _x000D_/>through green _x000D_/>it was love  _x000D_/>we did not pluck _x000D_/>the unsightly _x000D_/>growth  from the  _x000D_/>supple  _x000D_/>earth.

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael's boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies—while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices—the poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.