with snow pouring southward past the window

These poems move ferociously through landscapes of rupture, wielding exacting, rigorous vocabularies that feel scraped from the wary and hoarfrosted voice of a poet-seer who spares no bullshit: ‘No more I want to go home. No more I want to go into another time. No more want, just need.’ Kane’s word is urgent throughout, marked by an insistent naming of plants, people, places—an act of preservation against all that slips away: ‘gather them—my eyes are brimming with tears.’ Even as everything edges toward loss, this collection builds something lasting and vibrant: ‘for the sorrow to become something islandic. / Someplace we can travel back to together / if we have to, if we make it through these days.’ This book will gut you and sweep you clean.

Obtaining the necessary language,’ Joan Naviyuk Kane writes in her astonishing new collection of poems, with snow pouring southward past the window, ‘one of my children reminds me / that we continue to grow things here / where nothing fallows.’ What the poet discovers on her journeys into the fraught wildernesses of her Native lands and complicated family dramas, of history and desire, is a language capable of documenting and interrogating incalculable losses, in a range of forms conceived afresh and certain to leave her readers hungry for more. ‘A poem, / too, holds secrets that it cannot tell,’ she suggests, and in her telling, these secrets are transformed into the kinds of truth that will endure.

Joan Kane’s collection, with snow pouring southward past the window, is a brilliant, philosophically informed constellation that masterfully navigates trauma, violence, and grief with extraordinary lyricism. The speaker navigates a complex universe in this singular collection. This series of poems both shows and enacts how a self is brought to being through the abyss.

What troubled music our ears are filled with when we read Joan Naviyuk Kane’s poems with the intensity and care that they call for. She writes via a syntax of shadows, whispers within whispers, whose dense sonic interiorities work through a terrifyingly embodied colonial history, and through deep familial trauma. But the distressed white spaces of this work provide a clearing for the mind not only to (just, just) begin imagining other worlds. They also share with us the weight of winter’s unyielding silence, as Kane matter-of-factly states: ‘I will look through a darkness I could have walked through alone.’ Here is a poet who sings aliveness despite the brutality that continued breath demands.