American Book Award–winning poet dg nanouk 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.
(Wave Books, 2022) was a for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and was listed in The Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2022 and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry.
dg nanouk okpik was born and spent much of her life in Anchorage, Alaska. She graduated from Salish Kootenai College with an AFA in Liberal Arts and Liberal Studies, and later attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, graduating with an AFA and a BFA in Creative Writing before receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast College. okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Award, the May Sarton Award, and an American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012).
Reception to follow.
Taplin Gallery, Paul Robeson Center for the Arts
102 Witherspoon Street
Princeton, NJ 08542
- Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton
- Bain-Swiggett Fund, Department of English
- Land, Language, and Art, a Humanities Council Global Initiative
- Arts Council of Princeton
