Blood Snow

Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize Listed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2022 Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry American Book Awardwinning poet dg okpiks second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures. Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, dg okpiks relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a Shamans omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpiks poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpiks poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how ones existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.