Review by Jennifer Martelli
Years ago, in a poetry class, our teacher described poets like Lucille Clifton and Sylvia Plath as poets of distillation: poets who render meanings down to their most profound and dangerous essences. She talked about ancient hunters in cold climates who would freeze a thin whalebone in a block of ice. When the hunted beast swallowed the block, the ice melted, releasing the sharp points of the bone, which pierced the soft organs—the heart, the gut. Joan Naviyuk Kane belongs to this group of poets who distill emotion and render violence, motherhood, loneliness, and survival down to their truest manifestations. Using syntax, imagery, and language, Kane, in her latest collection, Ex Machina, takes the reader on this ouroboric reclamation process. In her poem “Turning Back,” she writes,
Set adrift, I wanted to stay near the shore
of something familiar but instead I trace
the shape of tuqqayuk, sea lovage, wild
celery, with something other than my tongue.
In exploring away from shore—from her home, family, and language—Kane’s speaker searches for a way to tell a story of displacement, colonization, and reclamation. She asks questions to the self and the reader, as in “The Angel of Yelling,”
How do you process information
& also help people hear
what you literally saw?
In many of her poems, Kane’s use of the ampersand acts as the bone that not only pierces but tethers emotions syntactically in a sea of white space. The “&” works differently than “and;” the words on either side are tighter, almost knotted. I could feel the pulling and rending in “Don’t Run Out,”
real & white as snow
have you forgotten
starting over, & over
the swan crossing
with the dark tide
southward to the sound
not too far off
firework & blast
of something hard to reach
Kane’s conjunctions “over & over” and “firework & blast,” yanked me from a connected spot on the line, down the page, to the next syntactical unit. As a reader, I want to stay still, but—like the speaker—I can’t. The poem “A Hammer & Drill-Bit to a Pane of Glass” shatters with its imagery, syntax, and rushing. Opening with a teeth-rattling title, Kane again employs the ampersand brilliantly, joining a noun and verb in the first line, “I walk along a shore of salt & search for a sky / for a sky.” Again, Kane does not allow us to linger long on the conjunction; instead, we are flung out to the white space of the page. We are pulled by the bone of the ampersand, with its hooks and curves: “headed fire & / recalling,” “spoons, thatch, & our / children,” “of potency & releasing / all of us.” This harsh movement reflects images of geo-political violence in the poem (Ukraine), as well as domestic violence. Kane invokes Sylvia Plath’s Poppies in October and Poppies in July, with their images of bloodied mouths and despair, as well as Julia Gogol’s lurid close-up image, Poppy. These incantations are placed across the page, almost as footnotes or echoes, pulling the reader’s gaze away from the poem to the violence.
The ampersand lends itself to lists as a way of organizing a series. Throughout Ex Machina, the poems grow heavy with lists of things that convey a sense of urgency—of flight, of displacement. “In Which the Poet Agrees That Being Alive is a Whole Bunch of Being Wrong,” Kane writes with a meta-sense
increasingly tearful & fearful
for my well-being. To stay overlong
betwixt foxglove & feverfew—
(ambivalent shades I care both ways)
ditigalis & parthenium—twee AF,
meadowrue, & rockcress too
The lists also serve to underscore the mass genocide of indigenous people forced to flee their land and their language—a crime committed by the United States government and still not adequately addressed. Kane includes two translations from the Inupiaq: “Patiq,” which translates to “Marrow,” and “Saakia,” which translates to “Reclamation.” These poems are rooted in the land, in the everyday, and in the emotional cost of displacement. In “Patiq,” the speaker lists
kigrawik, kayuqtuq, nunivaaksrat,
pamiuqtaq, pauluk, piġaluyak,
aliuġaq, quzimaq, piknik,
//
quvlilruȠa
and in “Marrow,”
peregrine falcon, red fox, berries & greens growing to profusion from the profuse earth,
fireweed, cormorant, compressed freshwater ice which is blue in huge,
sorrel, wild rhubarb, tall cottongrass
//
my eyes are brimming with tears
Written in columns, “Saakia” lists
marisq sailaq saatkaaq
aglaaq aglaan aglaktuȠa
which translates to
pill sailor shotgun
something written but; also am writing
Loss of language is rendered as a type of loneliness in this book, especially the loneliness of motherhood. In “Saqtuliq,” the speaker confronts the machine of colonization and misogyny.
Submerged willow brush & a wolverine,
& a mother, or a woman who would be one:
she sees others who will set to work,
turning the bureaucracy of such vulgar tongues
as driftwood serries into the flaw
of her throat
The title poem, “Ex Machina,” while addressing the “man-shaped hole in her brain,” also reflects a resiliency, the ouroboros,
blue
curl, & tendril :: bruise beneath what’s left of her
greening back into benignity & meanwhile the river
gurgles aleatoric into the harbor past an ukpeaġvik
This closing poem ends with both recognizing “another old danger” in “a time of cultural distress.” Yet, the voice unhooks for the barbs of retaliation, “different things have taught her to respond not to brutality / with pettiness, & to set down the speculative weapons . . .”
Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Ex Machina is a book of poems that is felt deep inside the body. The ice around Kane’s poems melts “& then there are the real poems / where the language creates its own tension.” Joan Naviyuk Kane bears witness to a machine that colonizes and intimidates and burns the land. Kane writes in the language of witness, reminds us “to create a story and to become a part of it, / to stay alive until we come back.”
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo). Kane is the author of several collections of poetry and prose: The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, The Straits, Milk Black Carbon, Sublingual, A Few Lines in the Manifest, Another Bright Departure, Dark Traffic, and Ex Machina. Dark Traffic was a finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s National Artist Fellow, Mellon Practitioner Fellow, and Whiting Award recipient, she’s recently been selected as a 2023-2026 Fulbright Specialist and the recipient of the 2023 Paul Engle Prize from the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. Forthcoming in 2024 is her edited anthology, Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic, as well as an essay collection, Passing Through Danger.
Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens, winner of the 2023 Italian American Studies Association Book Award and selected as a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and My Tarantella, also selected as a “Must Read” and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is the author of the chapbooks All Things are Born to Change Their Shapes, In the Year of Ferraro, and After Bird. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The Tahoma Literary Review, Scoundrel Time, Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co- poetry editor for MER.