The Straits

'The circumpolar north. The Inuit homelands. The Bering Strait, to reference one specific piece of it. It's a vast arctic region, mostly water, that Joan Naviyuk Kane writes from and for and toward and out of, and the challenge of those prepositions-the challenge of understanding where she might stand in this grave and imperiled part of the world-is taken up in this breathtaking collection of poems. Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiquak with family from King Island (Ugiuviak,) Alaska, and her work reveals a hunger for the landscape, for a language embedded in the land and in the traditional lifeways of the people, her people, who have lived there. But Kane's world extends beyond the boundaries of water and ice. A Harvard graduate with a dazzling literary career, Kane writes with one foot in her cultural tradition and a second in the world of contemporary poetry.' (From the Introduction by Summer Wood)