Dark Traffic creates landmarks through language, by which its speakers begin to describe traumas in order to survive and move through them. With fine detail and observation, these poems work in some way like poetic weirs: readers of Kane’s work will see the arctic and subarctic, but also, more broadly, America, and the exigencies of motherhood, indigenous experience, feminism, and climate crises alongside the near-necropastoral of misogyny, violence, and systemic failures. These contexts catch the voice of the poems’ speakers, and we perceive the currents they create.
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.
