Dark traffic

Kane plumbs her rich Inupiaq heritage and the complicated histories of the Arctic in her latest poetry collection, treating such difficult subjects as Japanese internment camps in pre-statehood Alaska and endemic domestic strife. Kane combats these forces by incorporating in her poems Indigenous words and phrases, which are often left untranslated, and through relentlessly creative wordplay. At times, Kane's puns are simple yet startling ("We rive a river where none exists"), overflowing with acoustic intrigue ("A house did seethe with drought, doubt, debt and creaking pipes"), and rife with baffling lexical dexterity ("she defers / her rapprochment with apoidea / over false oxlip & phlox"). Where there's humor, it bites ("How many Eskimo words are there for white people?"), and Kane is well aware of the limits of using language to measure the atrocities of empire: "I see the dark // horizon in the west. It rhymes with nothing. // Nothing, you see." A darkly dazzling title that will likely tempt readers into exploring Kane's previous work, especially Milk Black Carbon (2017) and the prize-winning Hyperboreal (2013).

EXCERPT FROM "DARK TRAFFIC" Consolation may turn out to be a guttural practice, after all, the small gesture   of sound lodged deep before it glides without warning downward.   There is nothing but the wind, a howl and dive where water is thrown   over water and sown into it.   Excerpted from Dark Traffic: Poems by Joan Naviyuk Kane All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.