Milk Black Carbon - (Pitt Poetry) by Joan Naviyuk Kane (Paperback)

About the Book

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details - motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic - negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.

Book Synopsis

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details - motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic - negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.

Review Quotes

Milk Black Carbon is at once a brilliant work of lyric art and a decoding of knowledges written 'in the dark cursive of a wolf/circling on sea ice.' Kane's is a vertiginous sensibility, chiseled into language in a precarious time, as the rising seas 'rephrase us.' She writes in English and Inupiaq Eskimo, toward a horizon of radical futurity, against nostalgia, with awareness that there is no turning back. This is a twenty-first century poetry, urgent, necessary, and of its time.-- "Carolyn Forche"

Her latest book of poetry contains themes of motherhood and the relationships between land and peoples, and ever present is her unmatched mastery of form and language. . . . unique to Milk Black Carbon is the palpable sense of urgency throughout the poems.-- "Jen Rose Smith"

The black ink of a strong, strong hand. A rare and real word-world, mind-muscled into serious relief, stopped into dream and meaning.-- "Olena Kalytiak Davis"

About the Author

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, 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.