The poems in Ex Machina are their own beings. Full of muscle, grief, and rage, they speak of and for themselves. Within them, words are physical manifestations of what they name— clubmoss, sea lovage, fish roe, fox —not metaphor "but drum / but map.” Inside violent loss, these poems are less interested in mere survival as they are in embodied, languaged sovereignty. The language of these poems “reminds us / to create a story and to become part of it, / to stay alive until we come back.” I found myself coming back again and again to meet Joan Naviyuk's work on its own terms, to learn from it, and to let myself be transformed in the quiet storm created on the page.

—Tamiko Beyer

Is a poem a refuge, or a reckoning? A weapon, or a dream? In the captivating brilliance of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s poetry, it is the relationship among these things—a net in which one can listen through the darkness to something “hard to reach / & harder to escape.” And Kane’s Ex Machina is not a net we should want to escape, being reminded, in it, how “to stay alive until we come back”— reminded that, in a syntax that refuses the limits of a life — across that disappearing land — there walks the poet, searching for sky. Suspended as both an island and its harbor, this is a work of courage, vulnerability, and fierce precision.

—Jennifer Elise Foerster

To enter Ex Machina is to be immersed in a lyric archipelago of sovereign intellect and affective resonance where “language creates its own tension.” These poems alchemize the seemingly unbridgeable distance between ouroboric grief and the forces that would subject it to a delimiting notion of love, which is to say capture without release. Relational threads of the nonhuman—fireweed, cormorant, fish roe, sourgrass, sea lovage, “earless seals,” “the voluble insinuations of the river,” ukpeaġvik—compose a lucent catalogue that accretes and concatenates across the dreamscape of these pages. Whenever I enter a poem by Joan Naviuk Kane, I enter a dream that I never want to end.

—Liz Howard

There is such beautiful ferocity within these poems, a fight the speaker won’t back down from. Pulling us into the storm of being “as you skin my throat and make me bleed, as I funnel gas into a skiff as if —as if at sea” she brings us into the tempest. And as you move through the landscape here, often cold and biting, there is a sense of solitude. “I will look through a darkness I could have walked through alone.” Solitude is different than loneliness, and these poems speak to the strength and the boldness of self. Ex Machina shows the granite and the armor that is inherent in survival. Joan Naviyuk Kane’s poems are questioning the atmosphere around her, as she moves through a broken world taking inventory, taking names, demanding something more, something better. Like storms when they break there is light to be found within, and she guides us through the darkness and into, “Someplace we can travel back to together if we have to, if we make it through these days.”
—Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe

Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Ex Machina holds, at its intimate center, a woman unmoored, a “man-shaped hole in her brain.” These visceral, grief-blown poems resist both confession and intellectualization until heartache finds its haven in language: “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.” Kane’s lyrical genius and matchless orchestration of words convert despair into a dance until “plunder, plunder” transforms into “plover.” We are lucky to witness the poet’s tenacity in the terror of “starting over, & over” until both she and we reach the place “where the language reminds us… to stay alive until we come back.”
—Eugenia Leigh

"What could not be vulnerable in such changing / light?" asks Joan Naviyuk Kane's impeccable chapbook Ex Machina. The poems here are unsentimental and unsparing; they tell stories of theft, erosion, and silencing, and they detail the depths of connection across time and space and the wish "for the sorrow to become something islandic." These new poems of brutal insight and electric lexicon further cement Kane's status as one of the most important poets writing today.

—Natalie Shapero

In this world, language is invisible but it is also a raft and it is also clubmoss. Language is in the contour of shoreline, oil pool, freshwater ice, and whirlwind. In Ex Machina, language is held like a secret, close to the body, and pressed against earth itself. Joan Kane shows us the possibility of language as if language is an ocean. This world is built with deft patience, and a unique way of looking. It is a world we long for but one we also abandon. And, it turns out, the world in Ex Machina is actually our own and the language in this book is ours too—so much beauty, so much sky.
—Jake Skeets

If the poet's work is to reveal, in all its grotesque convolutions, the emotional workings of human life–our motivations, regrets, celebrations, mournings–then Joan Naviyuk Kane is an expert technician, deep in the gut work and marking each turn with precise notation. Ex Machina is a (sometimes) lonely mapping of tangles, from knots "where language creates its own tension," to the deceiving dead-ends of human emotion. Where depletion lies, where land ends. And beyond, the sea and sounds of distance.

—Lehua M. Taitano

The poems in “Ex Machina” hold a fire and ferocity, the language stripped by pounding storms to its rawest and most refined form. “Resiliency exhausts me:/ don’t want to be metaphor anymore,/ but drum, but map.” A beating sense of presence, a means of finding ways. These are poems of saplings, sorrel, peregrine falcons, fox, fireweed, rhubarb, sourdock, and ice. “There is nothing sentimental/ in this forest,” Kane writes. Instead, Kane, a Guggenheim recipient and Whiting Award winner, gives us a look at existence in its pure form, in the cold-burning whiteness of solitude. There is fury here, not inchoate, but harnessed and powerful.

—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe June 9, 2023
 

Oscillating between presence and absence, mother, daughter, woman, inhabiting the "rift into language and grit," Kane reveals the ways we are made and unmade and made again. Dark Traffic is the poet at her most vulnerable—and most powerful.

—Abigail Chabitnoy

A brutal and beautiful book whose poems strain the lyric through concrete and confessional modes, translation, and unforgettable evocations of land and people burdened with—but not defined by—the legacies of colonial atrocity. Dark Traffic is a ravishing achievement—one of our best poets, at the height of her powers.

—Melissa Febos

Whether by intellect shot through with feeling, or feeling sharp with intellect, Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Dark Traffic is a vigorous account of [Cold War] communication systems, complicity, and [self] inquiry. Rich with experimentation and a clear ethic of attentiveness, Dark Traffic is an indomitable, resonate book.

—Shara Lessley

In Sublingual, Kane creates an earth on which all things are evidently their own opposites, endless and utterly bereft. These poems are catchy and thrilling and expose the violence of time and, inside it, our human vibrancy and violence. Every line—every word—is unexpected and exactly right. An encapsulation of a white landscape that bursts its capsule and gleams a thousand hues.

–Jennifer Croft

The poems in Joan Kane‘s SUBLINGUAL don’t flinch, display a fist. If a fist can be a heart and the arrow through it a pen. Kane’s images and language arrest and attest to a future, a present, a past that is melting against “vehement light.” There’s no need for fret or worry, however. However, it’s time to take note, to look back at what’s looking at you. Breathe these poems, be at mercy to the wind.

–Bojan Louis

Joan Kane‘s chapbook Sublingual dissolves under the tongue like a pill, a medicine that tastes like melting glaciers and displaced cultures, except it doesn’t solve, it only soothes, and it’s a complicated soothing, making distinctions been “stress puking” and “party puking,” which like the poems here enact a push-and-pull of modes: urgent warnings and sinuous meditations and letters to friends and fragments of stories. It’s a fresh introduction to this important and exciting poet’s work. In Sublingual, Joan Kane is an Arctic Rimbaud who sees images of vivid defeat and unlikely persistence, and “inflects them with purpose,” investigating “how many rules of the brute’s brutish language” she can “break in one poem,” pursuing dark passages and open waters, disappearing forests, with a head “in its fine blank way an original,” an adventuring Alice pursuing “what is left of the woods… what is left of me.”

–Ed Skoog

The black ink of a strong, strong hand. A rare and real word-world, mind-muscled into serious relief, stopped into dream and meaning.
—Olena Kalytiak Davis

Milk Black Carbon is at once a brilliant work of lyric art and a decoding of knowledges written "in the dark cursive of a wolf / circling on sea ice." Kane’s is a vertiginous sensibility, chiseled into language in a precarious time, as the rising seas "rephrase us." She writes in English and Inupiaq Eskimo, toward a horizon of radical futurity, against nostalgia, with awareness that there is no turning back. This is a twenty-first-century poetry, urgent, necessary, and of its time.
—Carolyn Forché

Her latest book of poetry contains themes of motherhood and the relationships between land and peoples, and ever present is her unmatched mastery of form and language. . . . Unique to Milk Black Carbon is the palpable sense of urgency throughout the poems.
—Jen Rose Smith

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq 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. The straits she navigates as a contemporary woman are churned by the pressures of multiple worlds. 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 poetics. Her poems condense at the intersection of gender and race and power relations. With gorgeous, precisely honed language and arresting imagery, Kane interrogates love and displacement, identity and obligation, loss and home.

—Summer Wood

“Arnica nods heavy-headed on the bruised slope.” In these vivid, disturbing, and mysterious poems, written in English and Inupiaq, Joan Kane writes out of the landscape and language of the far north. Hyperboreal is situated at a threshold between cultures, between inner and outer worlds, and the poems are voiced with a “knife blade at the throat’s slight swell.” Her compelling vision is earned through a language that will dislocate in order to relocate and whose tonal shifts are exact and exacting.
—Arthur Sze

Kane’s lyric voice is terse, lapidary; each of these poems is, as John Taggart would have it, a “room for listening.” There is an immense and insistent stillness here, “From / the forest / the wind / has all revised” to the “dreams inlaid with rigid marrow.” These are songs of ‘intaction,' of that which endures, poised against “the / long fermata of dusk / and its promised repetition.”
—G. C. Waldrep

I am mesmerized by these poems, their sonorous pathways across time and place; how they absorb and let me linger awhile in their stark beauty. Joan Kane has created a genuine indigenous poetic, irreducible, a point of reorigination and new beginnings. Hyperboreal will be remembered and celebrated.
—Sherwin Bitsui

These poems are much more than verbal constructs, though their language alone is enough to keep you reading. Joan Kane’s mind spends much time with itself; her eye sees itself as part of the landscape, which in this collection is meticulously rendered, “a bewilderment of white.” She does not find metaphors for life in the wilderness, but rather observes patterns of nature that life bears out. Hers is a voice without cultural or self-reference, a voice without verbal-technics -- as rare and stark as the main climatic idiosyncrasy of these poems, “a year of two winters.”

—Priscilla Becker

The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife is a groundbreaking collection of poems made of one long breath. The breath is enough to carry you the distance it takes to fly to the moon and return in one long winter night. I have been looking for the return of such a poet. Joan Kane crafts poems as meticulous as snowflakes. She is visionary and the poems carry this vision with solid grace.

—Joy Harjo

These poems are original, unsentimental, plain, and mysterious. There is something of Lorine Niedecker’s Wisconsin, and something of Willa Cather’s Nebraska or New Mexico in Joan Kane’s Alaska. And something more, “on the border of speech,” which yet gives us a new sense -- or maybe retrieves an old sense-- of experience. Sometimes, in these poems, description, and what we cannot quite find words for, underneath it, are enough; in fact, more than we would have known how to ask for: a lost people -- a shaman’s voice -- the voice of a glacier -- of a shell? “In a room in which you’re found at every margin / Forgetting you is nothing but a long discipline.”

—Jean Valentine