Blood Snow

Alaskan Native poet dg nanouk okpik’s debut book, corpse whale (2012), invited readers into a half-imagined arctic world, populated by prehistoric mastodons but also littered with plastic trash. A central feature of that book was the speaker’s disorienting use of “she/I,” which vocalizes a hybrid identity that reflects okpik’s Inuit-Inupiat heritage, and her upbringing by German and Irish caretakers. In Blood Snow, the poet employs these idiosyncratic pronouns more sparingly, toggling instead between a singular speaker who struggles with health issues, and a near-omniscient narrator who inhabits the perspectives of polar bears and mosquitos. 

Most of the poems in this collection are anchored by the immediate concerns of an arctic that is slowly dematerializing in an era of “melting / igloos & ice caves, rising butter clams clamped / shut rotten & rancid.” For okpik, subject and environs, exterior and interior are inseparable. “Physical Thaw” draws a direct connection between the dying earth and the speaker’s body:

I taste
Berries and roots
Polar cap          ice melt,
Swamp algae,
moose tracks,
covered dripping,
chartreuse moss,
rocks,
it reminds me of,
my collapsed veins,
IV        drip drip drip,
right arm,
restricted appendage,
pink-tan-blue
like frozen to liquid
freed from bodily
frost     thaw under sunbaked
paper birch peelings

A standout feature of Blood Snow is okpik’s skillful repetition of images and phrasing across multiple poems. Consider, for example, these variations on a theme, from, respectively, “Whiteout Polar Bears,” “Polar Bear Lost,” and “Skinny Boned Bear”: 

Dead on—in the night sky,
or stuck in the deep web,
bear stars exist. Name the
bone piles on the marsh
heaving […]

and 

Dead on with blank stares and thin 
boned with thick matted hair

and 

No fear, dead on in the night sky
Or stuck on the deep web, bear 
stars still exist. Name the bone pile.

And yet, against these unsettling images of death and disaster, okpik’s more direct expressions of lyric selfhood offer surprising solace:

I am human: an ego-syntonic woman;
water; I am contradiction, water & blood
on a page of words joining; meeting; in union;
a collision of squid ink; salmon & paper.