Blood Snow

dg nanouk okpik

Alaskan Native poet dg nanouk okpik's debut book, corpse whale (2012), invited readers into a half-imagined arctic world, populated by prehistoric mastodons but also littered with plastic trash. A central feature of that book was the speaker’s disorienting use of “she/I,” which vocalizes a hybrid identity that reflects okpik’s Inuit-Inupiat heritage, and her upbringing by German and Irish caretakers. In Blood Snow, the poet employs these idiosyncratic pronouns more sparingly, toggling instead between a singular speaker who struggles with health issues, and a near-omniscient narrator who inhabits the perspectives of polar bears and mosquitos.