CORPSE WHALE - DG NANOUK OKPIK

As previously stated, I’m not the biggest poetry guy, though it is Native History month, and I saw this title at the library and decided I should educate myself. I hate the cold and know very little about the Inuit and other far-north Amerindians so this seemed like a good place to get a taste of what they’ve got going on up there. Additionally, the cover and back about-the-author section suggested that the author stylizes their name in all lower-case letters, like bell hooks, which is a little flourish I’ve always liked. Anyway, the poems themselves are fascinating and strange. Okpik does their best to code-switch or meld Iñupiaq cultural references and signifiers and concerns with “Western” (a particularly stupid appellation in this case) poetics. Partly, this involves sprinkling in Inuit words, for which there is a glossary in the back. I like that they have a word for “a place to hunt owls” but, obviously, I speak not even one word of this language so I have no idea how idiosyncratic these definitions are. Likewise, okpik does their best to collapse the subject/object or human/nature dichotomy that is endemic to non-Indigenous modes of thinking. Okpik accomplishes this by hybridizing the subjects of sentences and stylizing them like, “She/I” as in “...She/I lie/s awake.” which is something I’ve never seen before and is strange enough to get the reader thinking in a different, more Iñupiaq way. There’s other interesting takes on the form, opik is free-versing it out, my favorite lil’ trick was a poem called Stereoscope where the text was placed in downward cascades on both sides of the page (get it?). There’s another that basically a wall of text, some of it crossed out. Outside of form these poems were strange. There’s a palpable sense of how much context I’m missing, for instance there are several images of “seal’s eyes”, which I’m sure has some cultural relevance and cultural connotations hundreds of years in the making, but which mean nothing to me. I’m not sure I was grabbed strongly by any of the poems; I don’t think I’ll carry them around with me the way one does the best poetry. I was partial to the lines, “dancing in the/ midnight sun not for law, or man, but for whale and blood.” and, ‘“A driftwood mask let her be inside out.” but the thing I’ll mostly take away is some of the Inuit words and at the sense of difference this thing was able to conjure. 7 Ravens