A review of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s

Ex Machina

Reviewed by Jennifer Badot

[Staircase Books, 2023]

Ex Machina, a chapbook, is Joan Naviyuk Kane’s ninth book of poetry. It follows The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (2009), Hyperboreal (2013), The Straits (2015), Milk Black Carbon (2017), Sublingual (2018), A Few Lines in the Manifest (2018), Another Bright Departure (2019) and Dark Traffic (2021). It is the inaugural title of Staircase Books, a micro-press out of Cambridge, Massachusetts launched in 2023 by James Fraser, Manager of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, and Bella Bennett, a graphic designer.

Ex Machina is a beautiful object in and of itself and is worth beholding: a small shiny obsidian-black book with the title and poet’s name embossed in slender silver typeface on the cover. Inside, we encounter the alchemical and unmappable terrain that marks all of Kane’s arresting poetry. Here, we enter a realm of language that is embodied; words are returned to their heft and physicality; old meanings are wrenched from layers of colonialist and imperialist time. Two of the poems, “Saakia” and “Patiq,” are written in Inupiaq, the language of King’s Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska, where Kane’s family is from. An English translation of both poems, “Reclamation” and “Marrow” respectively, is provided on facing pages.

The themes that have been constant in Kane’s work from the beginning — single-motherhood, loss, generational trauma, human relations, the relationship between land and peoples, reclamation and sovereignty — remain steadfast in Ex Machina. And the quality that has always drawn me toward and then caused me to fall deeply into her poems abides here as well: it is the sheer beauty and precision of the language, the care that Kane takes with words. Does she coax them to yield and do her bidding? Or do they come out of the ground and the sea of their own accord as she grapples with meaning and emotion?

In the opening poem, “Don’t Run Out” Kane writes: “I remember how/without you/a woman’s quarrel/it passes into a quarrel/with no one.” This strikes me as an ambiguous echo of William Butler Yeats’ — We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry — and tees us up for what, at least partially, can be described as a book of quarrel and dilemma: quarrels with our intimates and with ourselves, and the impossible dilemma of “working vanishment from meaning with the fury that to choose implies choice.”

In some of these poems, Kane, an Inupiaq woman, confronts the dynamics of intimate relationships beneath the weight and reality of centuries of dominance and structural violence against indigenous women by white men:

Once, you made me envy you —

your glut confusion bruised

by every weapon or want

as cold tongues turned the land

for life, mixing richness into the soil

to raise one last thick forest

for cambium to gargle and soothe,

you struck root to brutalize and render

a girl into something domestic,

to consume to extinction, to leer

at hairgrass as it too loses its scale.

If I had never ceded continents,

how could I usher another

diminishment…

and

What parsimony yet smothers

and bakes me as I erase

cities, submerge countries, drowning

the engines and braying machines

of empire, my gristle nothing

but abundance, my inner

rind familiar and serviceable

as you skin my throat and make

me bleed, as I funnel gas

into a skiff as if — as if at sea. “

—from “On No Longer Being a Carbon-Offset Girlfriend”

In “Letter from Austerlitz,” — possibly a dual reference to Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY where Kane was a writing resident in 2021, and W.G. Sebold’s novel Austerlitz, a book that contains many dreamscapes in its telling of the life of a boy who survived the Holocaust — Kane writes:

           Always a mother,

       & shame, & absent

a worthwhile father. So I

came to know what it meant

to scratch fragments are the only

form he trusts onto the page—

suddenly I grew uncomfortable

to be loved, to know

                                          what was wrong

                                   with the dream

was wrong with the people.

Perhaps the “dream” referenced here is the western White myth of romantic love, which just comes down to another form of dominance, extraction, and possession. I also note that with “fragments are the only/form he trusts” Kane conjures short-story writer Donald Barthelme, who once said, “Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how…” and whose style was collage-like and characterized by subversive syntax, interruption and ellipsis — a style resonant with Kane’s.

In the poem, “In Which the Poet Agrees That Being Alive is a Whole Bunch of Being Wrong,” which is in turns a hilarious, erudite, dazzling, playful, mocking, self-mocking and sonically fierce display of Kane’s rhetorical and lexical powers, she writes:

& —yes‚—I confessed

to a certain professionalism

when it comes to pissing off men

to a handful of ash & more

intractable problems. Over-

indulgence, at times, & yawn:

increasingly tearful & fearful

for my well-being. To stay overlong

betwixt foxglove & feverfew—

(ambivalent shades I care both ways)

digitalis & parthenium — twee AF,

meadowrue, & rockcress too

beneath a grappling canopy

of boreal trees leafing out,

perhaps always unleaving.

Kane’s ability to incantate in the register of ferocity, virtuosity and the colonizer’s rhetoric is equally matched by her powers to sing in the register of tenderness and The Real. I felt the poem called “Marrow,” deep in my own marrow and carried it with me all day.

In this poem the speaker has traveled through “a wave in rough seas” to visit a woman and bring her some nourishment. The speaker fears for this woman, for “She is trenchant.” A stanza break offers a moment of rest and silence, and then a question enters the poem like a wave: “Remember how there used to be many birds at the back of the island?” This is “answered” with:

There is an image that has been reflected. I reached the end of it, my limit, my destination:

all is depleted. There is nothing left.

No land to be seen anywhere.

And then, the poem moves toward its imperative: “Listen to that distant sound,” it says and offers a catalog of botanicals, creatures, and gifts from the land that includes “peregrine falcon, red fox …sorrel, wild rhubarb…fish roe...compressed freshwater ice which is blue in hue,” and ends with “Gather them/my eyes are brimming with tears: I/whirlwind”

In these lines of longing and reaching, gathering and remembering; these lines where there is nothing; and “I/whirlwind”— how does this language not root its way into your animal heart?

I am equally astounded by the poem “Saqtuliq” — how it delivers its acute critique of Western Individualism and ignorance in the form of a question that simultaneously accuses and grieves  as it swims down the page:

What could not be vulnerable in such changing

light? & what could anyone who has not

found a sense of the enormous

meaningless of

individuality 

                           between the complex anticipation of the sea

as it parallels the voluble insinuations of the river

     thick with rich fish flush with eggs

begin to understand

that to lose one’s land

has nothing to do with storms?

Coming to the last poem in the book, which is the title poem, I feel a profound sense of release as

…the man-shaped hole in her brain

empties of hate as she combs a tangle of dark brown

hair from the crown of a child’s head to whorl, blue

curl, & tendril:: the bruise beneath what’s left of her

greening back into benignity…

A release from the tension and pressure — and exhaustion — that has accumulated over the course of the book and a return to “benignity,” to the softness and vulnerability of a simple maternal act.

And the saving grace? The means of release?

…Different

different things

have taught her to respond not to brutality

with pettiness, & to set down the speculative weapons

she may have raised in a time of cultural distress.

It’s the “Different/different things” that come to save our protagonist in the end — those “Different/different things” that the “grid-girded world” has no language to name.