Okpik Street in Barrow, Alaska
Corpse Whale by dg
nanouk okpik has just been published by the University of Arizona Press. Dg is
a graduate of the Institute of American Indian arts, where I have taught--and
been taught in turn--for 22 years. She is Inupiaq Inuit originally from Alaska's
Arctic Slope. Her family resides in Barrow, Alaska. She holds a BFA in Creative
Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA in Creative
Writing from Stonecoast College.
Her work is imagistic, but also linguistically and sonically
rich. I was asked by the press to write a blurb, but the request came at a time
when I just couldn’t get it done. Blurbs are difficult. One doesn’t want to
make extraordinary claims, but one also doesn’t want to understate a poet's or a
book’s promise. So I failed to come up with a usable blurb in time. However,
near the deadline I dreamed a blurb that turned out to be too odd to use in
marketing a book. I awoke one
morning with the line “If the ears could speak, this is the language they would
use” in my head. Although those words might not help sell copies, I stand by my dreamwords. Corpse Whale bridges the intuitive and the scientific, the traditional and contemporary, through a language that derives both from dg's traditional culture and language and the sonic legacy of poets like T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas.
(By the way, a corpse whale is a narwhal, whose name is
derived from the Old Norse word nár, meaning "corpse," which
refers to the animal's greyish, mottled pigmentation, like that of a drowned sailor.)
My former colleague, Arthur Sze, wrote a beautiful essay
introducing dg’s work here:
One of dg’s poems can be found here:
Here is dg’s website:
Buy the book from one of our local independent bookstores
(Collected Works, as everyone knows, is my favorite). Support face-to-face
contact before it disappears altogether:
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