Listed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2022
**Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry
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American Book Award-winning poet dg okpik's 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 okpik's 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 Shaman's omniscient voice, we are
greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik's 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, okpik's poetry
speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one's existence in the
world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.