How to Dress a Fish

by Abigail Chabitnoy

Poetry that crafts a prismatic vision of Nativeness at the intersection of language, history, family, and identity

Winner of Colorado Book Award in Poetry Category

Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize

In How to Dress a Fish , poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael's boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies―while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices―the poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.

Genres: Poetry

152 pages, Paperback

Published February 5, 2019

About the author

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY holds a BA in Anthropology and English from Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. She was a Colorado State University Crow-Tremblay Fellow, a 2016 inaugural Peripheral Poets Fellow, and a recipient of the John Clark Pratt Citizenship Award from Colorado State University. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Red Ink, Nat Brut, Tin House, Gulf Coast, and others. Of Germanic and Aleut descent, she is a Koniag descendant and member of Tangirnaq Native Village, and grew up in Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Colleen Samura · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quietly powerful look at the shaping of identity and family history. This collection is intriguing, with a clinical precision in its examinations. There are at times too much distance between the narrator and the subject, voiding the text of some emotional resonance. However, this ultimately serves to portray the startling and painful truths the poet presents as she trudges through the legacy of abuse against indigenous peoples and the echoing effects of that displacement through generations of descendants.

[Izabella Britten · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was really interesting, kinda depressing. But it was a good search of finding your own family history, and learning about the history of the residential schools in the United States. I really like how she took documents and turned it into poetry and she did a wide variety of poetry. Coming from an indigenous community it was really empowering to see an indigenous poet. However it just wasn’t really my style. And it was a little hard to get through but overall I really did like it.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Consider the fish being "dressed" as a mythical creature, and a metaphor for migration. How does a salmon travel? What if a salmon were to travel through a dream, or you knew the salmon had traveled through your dreams, and then you had purchased salmon at the grocery store. And this disjunction was how you discovered your identity. Because this is how sense and discovery are built into Chabitnoy's book. Like a dream. But, in this case, the contents of the dream exist in an archive. Her ancestor, Michael Chabitnoy, really existed. She can find his name among documents, but he's not fully documented. Kind of like how a dream still exists in a person's memory. But the full recall of the dream feels impossible.

I am fascinated with Chabitnoy's docupoetics that is both fact and mere gesture toward fact. Where the documentation proves Michael Chabitnoy existed, but leaves so much unresolved about that existence. Which is kind of the realm of myth. Or at least the spirit of mythos. A vague figure from the past whose narrative is filled in and elaborated on, because without him, the poet would not have existed. And it’s how Chabitnoy can mix together the myth around journey, the discovery of family, the myth around self, the documentation of self, the dream of a self who had arrived in the continental United States, and what is this myth supposed to look like?

The book is so moving. Where sometimes it seems to exist in a dream. And sometimes it's a long deliberation. How is it someone finds their way into a heritage? How do they reconcile a multi-racial identity? I suppose mythos provides an expansive enough frame to encompass all these variables.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

With great lyricism and poignancy, these poems establish a genealogy based on the sparsest of records; sparse because of forced displacement by colonizers, colonizers who, moreover, were intent on eroding the native cultures' sense of community at every turn. The poems document the speaker's search for her Aleut roots and her attempt to connect to her present through them, and in doing so, wonder about the meaning of rootedness. How and where does a sense of rootedness happen? Can facts provide that sense? What sort of knowledge is it that could? What is the importance of how one comes by such knowledge? Is where am I from a decision in the end? The poems set in the unencumbered world of dreams seem to suggest that theirs is the place where connectedness and connections may occur. The different poetic sequences in the collection shed different lights on the core facts, weaving them into a story or stories. There are indeed many "ways to skin a fish" (title of a sequence in the Addendum), or to dress it for that matter. And together they make a beautiful and compelling whole that doesn't ask to be set in stone. I love the questions this collection raises and how it addresses them.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry collection is about Chabitnoy attempting to come to terms with the time her great-grandfather spent in a residential school for native children and also her identity as a person with both indigenous and white roots.

I particularly like that the poems span a range of styles, including snippets from government documents and translations of primary texts.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Poetry that crafts a prismatic vision of Nativeness at the intersection of language, history, family, and identity”—less poetic than prosaic. Most of the poems are visually challenging and many impossible to read aloud.

[Myra Scholze · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read coming out of Kodiak. I felt like most of the imagery went over my head.

[David C Ward]

See my forthcoming review in PNReview

[Mandy E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poem as archive, poem interrogating archive
Critique of the language of historical narrative, of linguicide, of genealogy
Identity

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible. a must read even if you don't like poetry!!

[Kirsten Jolly · Rating 3 out of 5]

A unique poetic approach to history and heritage, even if it was difficult to follow.

[Alexis Kop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an original use of poetry and language to explore colonialism.

[Queer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of poetry I’ve read jn a long time. Perhaps longer than I can remember.

[Reagan Kapasi · Rating 3 out of 5]

For when you want to learn about the multidimensional nature of nativeness

[Stevie Wiedl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I happened upon this book in the library, and I'm so glad the title caught my eye. What a fantastic poet Abigail Chabitnoy is.

[Quoth the Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of heritage-transitioning between the unknown past and a present that is wishing for answers. Chabitnoy works to capture the pieces of her lineage and cling to them as slip away. "I thought you yesterday in the wind" from the poem Survey of Resource Articulation captures the crux of the poems. To want someone, to hear someone, and to remember them as they are moving away and becoming a part of the Earth. The breakage and reflections on being Native American with its oppressed history combined with the muddled feelings about being both half Native American and half white, produced a twisting, purging motion that emphasized the circular nature of truth.

Only the beginning is true
each time

Without a coherent beginning and picking up those pieces, Chabitnoy dissolves these timelines by the end of the collection. The beginning can be wherever it lands, wherever truth draws itself over and over.