Cormorant Hunter's Wife - The

by Kane, Joan

This collection of poetry is inspired by the author’s lineage as an Iñupiaq Eskimo woman with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. The poems’ syncopated cadences and evocative images bring to life the exceptional physical and cultural conditions of the Arctic and sub-Arctic that have been home to her ancestors for tens of thousands of years, while the poems’ speakers refer to an indigenous identity that has become increasingly plural.

The author’s perspective as a Native person affords her unique insight into the relationship with place and self, which she applies in her consideration of the arctic landscape and to questions of adaptation and resilience. Kane’s work refers to the Iñupiaq oral tradition, and while in some poems she continues to revisit, rewrite, and revise traditional narratives that are suited to the lyric form, she moves beyond narrative retelling, honoring the legacy of imagination that has sustained Iñupiaq people for millennia.

Joan Kane is a poet who lives in Anchorage.

This is an Alaska writer to watch, to read and to savor, one who expands the minds and hearts of her readers.

—Peggy Shumaker, Writer Laureate of Alaska, and author of Gnawed Bones and Just Breathe Normally