"A raven's slit tongue. God's eye,                      
                   the wound that opens" (41)  

Wrecked. Altered forever. Hyperboreal is the kind of work that requires no explanation, needs no overly detailed review to mash its creation into obscurity. I still think about these poems months later, and likely will be thinking about them for years.

They’re short; sometimes only a few lines, but each word simmers, bites you with its soft destruction. Kane melds the landscape with the personal (or rather, asks, what’s the difference between them? What is our internal landscape?), shows the animal as they are, untouched: “An axe lodged in the roof,//A wolf whose mouth will proclaim” (10).

Her poems are written in both English and Inupiaq, exploring heritage, identity, and ancestry. The poems written entirely in Inupiaq are inaccessible to an English speaker but that’s part of the beauty of the book; as Native languages are pushed into extinction, these poems act dually as political and as historical, known only to those who speak the language.

"What I mean to say is,
I am not sure I will ever  
become the person I had hoped, 
or forgive myself the inaccuracy 
of estimation." (36)  

Lines like these, placed in between evocative descriptions of Alaskan landscapes, are deeply personal to both the writer and reader. I would have read this book faster the first time, as it’s short (only 63 pages) but I had to keep stopping to calm down my heart, or sit with the fact that the poem just punched me in the gut. With the wind knocked out of me, I kept coming back, hungry, for more.

Whether or not you’re starting to study ecopoetry (as this was the first book assigned to my ecopoetry class my final semester) or simply need a book to both steady and unhinge you, Hyperboreal will both educate and eviscerate you.

Joan Naviyuk Kane is an Inupiaq poet from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She also wrote The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009) and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018.

Hyperboreal. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2013.