Thu, Jun 29
|Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse
dg nanouk okpik, Blood Snow
Poems of deep attention and prismatic intelligence, which render a collapsing biosphere from the perspective of an ancient Arctic culture rooted in community, survival and guardianship. -- 2023 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry
Date, Time & Location
Jun 29, 2023, 6:00 PM MDT
Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
About the Event
This will be an in-store event and live streamed to Zoom. Register for zoom here.
Blood Snow can be purchased online from CW here or by calling the store (505) 988-4226. Signed copies will be available after the reading.
Listed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2022 Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry
American Book Award–winning poet dg okpik’s second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures. Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.
It is a masterful book of poetry, light in the hand and heavy in the heart. It is easy to read: the pages unravel as smoothly as balls of string. It’s exceptional in what it says, the poet constructing a simultaneously conflict-filled and congruous modern world stand holds a veil between two cultures and four centuries, but also between nature and everything that threatens it. It is more remarkable, perhaps, in the empty pauses she offers to let the empty room speak for her. B.A. Van Sise, New York Journal of Books
dg dives deeper into her work in this Pasatiempo feature with Spencer Fordin.
About the Poet
dg nanouk okpik was born in and spent much of her life in Anchorage, Alaska. She attended Salish Kootenai College, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award, the May Sarton Award, and an American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale. In March 2023 dg was the recipient of the $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, a Yale University prize designed to spotlight literary achievement and enable writers to focus on their craft. Blood Snow (Wave Books, 2022) is her second book.