Event details

A reading by American Book Award–winning poet dg nanouk okpik. 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, 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.

“Blood Snow” was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and was listed in The Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2022 and long-listed for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry.

Reception to follow.

Taplin Gallery, Paul Robeson Center for the Arts
102 Witherspoon Street
Princeton, NJ 08542