Inupiaq poet Joan Naviyuk Kane grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She earned a BA at Harvard University and an MFA at Columbia University. Kane’s spare, lyric poems are rooted in her Arctic homeland and concerned with movement: enlarging, thawing, accruing, crossing, even at times transforming. She considers themes of ecological, domestic, and historical shifts.
By Joan Naviyuk Kane
I wished to be closer to my mother
to think of displacement in a different way.
To part the bright green new growth
of a plant she has asked me to gather.
We never imagined so many years apart.
I have no way to make...
By Joan Naviyuk Kane
Every door stands an open door:
our human settlements all temporary.
We share together the incidental shore
and teach the young to tend the lamp's wick,
weary of anyone small enough to bar our entry.
