Milk Black Carbon

by Joan Naviyuk Kane

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details – motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic – negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.

Genres: Poetry, Indigenous

72 pages, Paperback

Published January 25, 2017

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

[Julie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucky me. Along the way, on my Reading Road Trip, I found several new poets, including Joan Naviyuk Kane. She's an Inupiaq American poet, and her writing conjures the nature-based world of Alaska.

I could not help but think of Eowyn Ivey's writing here, and Mary Oliver's, too. Ms. Kane's writing is also, of course, uniquely her own.

Give or Take a Century

A man goes on a journey, a woman does not.
Instead, birches murmur into the song
of a bird unseen, the forest endlessly receding.

To be alone and without purpose: a seed
borne on wind to flat stones arrayed
on the remote shore. Witness to news,

songs, myelin. One of our last
a succession of ribs distinct and vast
in sudden collapse. Mother, we make

no choices. Mother, he counts our frail bones.

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Diction and sound work go crazzyyyy

[Queer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I linger over these words. Was there a bird hunting whales when you were weaned from your mother’s breast - still brooding in the nest?

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe my favorite of Joan Navikyuk Kane's books, though I have loved all of them. The poems are so much of the landscape they are from, the Arctic, there isn't a word that's exact enough to describe this (connected, related, etc. don't seem right). They are of ice and snow (though painfully aware that climate change has lessened both) and fog and water, beautiful and strange, mysterious and then suddenly clear. The voice in them speaks with embodied authority, so it's impossible not to listen and be moved.

[Patti K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inupiaq author Kane lives in Anchorage and published this, her fourth
collection in 2017. Her mother taught her and her sons the native language
and now she uses it in poems to reclaim her origins. She does not want or
like the fetishization of a romantic people from the far past--here she
emphasizes the diversity and complexity of Native Americans. In "Compass,"
"I let him do what he will to me--/ we are traveling into the waves/ and the
ocean is torn by swells./ I am cautious. The moon,/it can barely be sensed,/
it cannot be helped./ This poem deals with the violence that women have long
been forced to endure throughout history. Yet here, she forces his will into
something that is broken away. Her work are lyrical investigations of how
language can transform our legends and facts of identity, land, and home.
Recommend.

[Peter Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

All Night Long I Am Narrowing

I tried to pass safely through
danger, like you, the mate to a shoe
hurled by a breaking wave.

The sun never fell away.
It angled. I conjured
a small opening. How

a current drags out to sea
beyond a place you didn't pass,
but skirted. Perhaps not a current

but another woman. She tugs
the waves under, troubling the surface.
How often, who else? And what of.


Taktugziun

Manimaiga-
malinniagratugut
mallatuq.

Nuyaqtuna. Taggiq,
ikpinanailaq,
iluilaq.

Ilisiruna, ilita.tuna.
Ilaiyairuna aklunaamiik.
Qaagaana.

Uaalukitaagtuq umiaq.
Quliaqtuna aptauqtuana-
iitaaga pularuq.

ilana.tuq.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quiet and beautiful. The pastoral imagery is strong, as is the emotional heart of the work.

Some favorite moments:

I tried to pass safely through
danger, like you, the mate to a shoe
hurled by a breaking wave.

The city is his, it glisters.
I worried snow down
from the roof. It buried me.

what he threw broke through
it has broken away.

A garment corners the woman
I was to become.

The woman
drifted in deep with words
finds inferior comfort
all over hell,
her ancient region.

How time passes just as the light
does: it darkens and is gone.

I am of disproportionate weakness.

[Chattynatty Van Waning · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I’m sometimes just not the right sided brain reader when it comes to poetry. I’m missing the context, the story. The words look beautiful on the page. I tried “googling” the poems/words that were written in her native language, unsuccessfully. The author is Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo- Alaska. She was winner of the 2023 Paul Engle award. I had the honor of hearing her acceptance speech and she was a truly genuine person, in person.

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a cold, rainy November night in the Caribbean when I finally read Milk Black Carbon. It isn't as cold as the poems' Arctic territory, and somehow I relish this best: this certain knowledge that I'm so ill-equipped for the home and bitter-familiar hearth these poems conjure, that I would die before I even dreamed of touching the ice.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Careful and daring, precise and wild: some poems succeed with startling vigour, others drip and seemingly fall over their (linguistic) two left feet. But, on the whole, when it works, it works. The Arctic is ever-present and irreplaceable. I will be looking out for more from her!

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this collection, Joan Naviyuk Kane continues her stunning poetry I already got to love so much from her previous work so firmly rooted in its landscape and its language, the rising sea, and the climate change, but, also personal loss and searching. Poems for now and way beyond.

[Lexi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was able to make connections based on what I’ve learned in classes or my own reading regarding the importance of place, story, etc within culture. Some I found really interesting and others I didn’t quite understand, but still appreciate.

[Zoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection feels simultaneously bleak and rich. I feel like there's a strong emotional undercurrent, and I love the imagery, but I wasn't able to connect or follow along with many of the jumps or the meaning behind them.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautiful collection, if a little uneven. A lot of emotion, a sense of geography and connection to the land, exquisite word choices.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5)

Somewhere / snow falls on something illicit

[Lisa Stice · Rating 5 out of 5]

These lyrics navigate the sometimes fragmented and everchanging landscape/culture of the Arctic and the geography of self, marriage, motherhood, and extended family.

[Bathsheba Demuth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first of Joan Naviyuk Kane's books I read, and I go back and back to it - go find a copy ASAP.

[g · Rating 2 out of 5]

i don’t know that the poems or collection at large did what the book description claims they do