with snow pouring southward past the window: Poems

by Joan Naviyuk Kane

The latest poetry collection from Kingsley Tuft's finalist Joan Naviyuk Kane.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published March 3, 2026

About the author

Joan Naviyuk Kane is an Inupiaq American poet. She is 2014 Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at the School for Advanced Research.

Joan Kane is Inupiaq Eskimo, with family from King Island and Mary's Igloo, Alaska. She graduated from Harvard College and from Columbia University with an M.F.A.

She lives in Anchorage, Alaska with her husband and sons.

Reviews

[Seher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this!

Not too bad, but also not too good! The cover is sweet, but oddly childish and doesn’t go with the type of poetry written although the title is very interesting!

The poems I really liked were the follows

- Yes
- Din
- Epiphany
- No Litanies, No
- Marrow

[Kuu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.
I was very excited for this collection of Far Northern Indigenous poetry, but sadly, this collection overall didn't manage to impress me. Some poems were a 4 or a 5, but many others were a 2 or 3, leading to a total rating of 3. A lot of the time, my main issue was the formatting of the poems, which made them difficult to read and (to me) didn't do anything to add to the meaning (whereas in some other poems, the formatting definitely enhanced it!), and much of the collection failed to reach me emotionally. There's a few poems in here that I really enjoyed, but majority were just... meh.

[Keyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found these poems really poignant, evocative and rich in their imagery, and captured the emotions present behind the work. The recurring setting of Anchorage was really well-done, and there are moments of clever line formatting, as well as some black-outs (and what does it mean, to remove name?). Will probably look more into this poet's work now that I've read this book.

Thank you NetGalley and University of Pittsburgh Press for the ARC!

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to the publishers – University of Pittsburgh Press– for giving me access to this book as an E-ARC via Netgalley. All opinions expressed are my own.

I generally don’t read poetry or prose but feel like it’s good to branch out. I liked the different formatting of the poems, made it interesting to read.