Lucien Darjeun Meadows | Contributing Writer
Blood Snow
dg nanouk okpik
Wave Books, 2022
American Book Award-winning Inupiaq poet dg nanouk okpik’s second book Blood Snow (a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize) challenges whitestream notions of individual and species-bound identity. Amid ecological devastation, okpik testifies to the wondrous, yet imperiled, multispecies kinship networks across lands and waters sometimes called Anchorage, Alaska. As her speaker asks:
[…] Listen to the thaw in the spongy
depths of a quantum multiverse; of silver
globules rising, in the air-lunged
permafrost—floating—floating above,
little people on the backs of bowheads,
carrying a rusted steel box of olden tools.“Fuse”
Listen. What could we all learn if we were to listen more? Papaschase Cree descendant Dwayne Donald writes of decolonizing research through a practice of Indigenous Métissage, where writers seek “to inspire readers and listeners to examine the routes of their own interpretations—to see themselves implicated in the stories told—and make critical connections to teaching, learning, and public policy issues today.” This inspiration is part of Blood Snow’s vital work. I listen and list—lean in, open—to okpik’s book, where time and space fold into a multiverse, mosquitoes speak to poets, and identity becomes porous. Throughout, okpik shows the undeniable ongoing violence of colonization and industrial capitalism; still, though, she avoids all-encompassing despair. As the singular human I dissolves across Blood Snow, what emerges in its place is multiple and offers flexible, resilient relations across and within species.
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Consider okpik’s title: Blood Snow, a phrase that repeats across the collection and refers, in alpine and polar regions, to the escalating phenomenon of microscopic algae blooms (due to climate change) producing red-colored snow. By using the phrase blood snow, without modifiers or conjunctions (e.g., bloody snow or blood on snow), okpik blurs boundaries between those who can bleed and those who cannot, destabilizing binaries between agentic, sentient subjects and those who are often assumed to be passive objects. The network of kinship, with all its responsibilities, expands. As Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear describes, for many Indigenous communities, more-than-human relatives, like “stones, thunder, or stars,” are “sentient and knowing persons” who relate with and affect all species.
In Blood Snow, okpik entangles human, plant, animal, and meteorological beings, for as she writes in “Dear Mommie, (I’m sick),” “It’s framed as a taffeta float of air in the rosebud blood snow we see a split lip, cut cheek, ripped nostril at ground zero.” Snow blooms across flower (rosebud) and animal (blood), and we witness the pain of this “rosebud blood snow” as their face is violated. Likewise, in “Skinny Boned Bear,” the speaker realizes, “I’m neck-snapped to the slush ice. / Cheek Blood Snow.” As in her title, okpik avoids additional words or punctuation that would delineate borders between bodies (e.g., my cheek, bloody in the snow). No borders exist, when “neck-snapped to the slush ice,” between “Cheek Blood Snow.” Through this often painful convergence, we realize connection and responsibility across the network.
These multispecies connections and responsibilities emerge throughout Blood Snow, as when okpik uses “She/I” as the speaker of numerous poems, from the first (“Foregrass”) to the last (“Blood Snow at Cambridge Bay”), escalating in frequency across the last third of the collection. By disrupting the common poetic tendency to speak as a singular, human, and privileged I, and instead speaking as a plural, multispecies, and imperiled She/I, okpik doubles voice across species to guide readers toward more robust awareness of kinship responsibilities and relations. In “Thrush’s Melody,” for example, okpik writes:
She/I of double women shades,
with the song thrush’s melody,
wearing a double shroud
over the land of dead-eyed people
of no sound, a dimension of lyric pushing
In this literal “double women,” the double speaker she/I recognizes the personhood of all beings alongside the potential of lyric to help us remember these relations. There is no singular identity. There is only relation. These voices exist as “double women,” dressed in a “double shroud.” Through these connections, even in a soundless land, the lyric impulse transforms what is possible from the stark opening ecologies of “Death Valley” and “sand flea storm” to the joyful “yield to sea light, sing thrush sing / for snow and twenty-five below” closing the poem.
okpik also uses I and me in several poems using she/I, dissolving and reconstituting the self in a multivalent process similar to the ecological processes she observes. In “Foregrass,” a singular speaker announces, “I see:”, witnessing small ecological relatives one could hold in their hand, from “little stemmed flowers” to “soda ash from ceramics.” In contrast, the speaker as she/I participates in large, even abstract actions and processes, as when “She/I wear a time meter” and they “study the sea depth of my/her childhood.” Likewise, in “Oil Energy & Natural Gas,” one of a few wider poems across this largely left-aligned and narrow-lined collection, okpik follows her speakers (again, she/I) as they persist in the “rush hour horns,” “acrid crude daze,” and the “weight of smog.” This polluted environment links the Brooks Range in northern Alaska with Houston, Texas through the oil and gas stolen from one land and shipped to another. Amid this devastation, okpik’s speakers (often of indeterminate or multiple species) survive. They go “fishing,” they “churn,” and they join with caribou in parallel language as both, toward the poem’s end, both “break through” the ice “risking / something new” and “looking for moss.” Yet, even so, in the final line, both “rest and die.” So, too, does okpik’s final poem, “Blood Snow at Cambridge Bay,” break away from the traditional punctuation used in most of Blood Snow, shifting instead into ga(s)ps of white space and also ending in death for her plural speakers:
She/I die leaving behind Polaris’s crystal flakes
at Cambridge Bay cabin
The weight of violence augments the pressurized experience of okpik’s compact, terse poems.
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Ecological grief and trauma, perpetuated by ongoing colonialism, are ever-present in Blood Snow. This concern is clear from okpik’s poem titles, including “Anthropocene Years,” “Petrified Melt,” “A Glacial Oil World,” “Ice Age Two,” “Fossil Fuel Embers,” “Frightening Acid Flakes,” and the aforementioned “Oil Energy & Natural Gas.” This concern creates an interior envelope for the collection, as “Anthropocene Years” is Blood Snow’s third poem and “Oil Energy & Natural Gas” the penultimate poem. Meanwhile, the word blood appears in sixteen poems, most often (seven times) in “When the Mosquitoes Came.” Here, an invasion of mosquitoes mirrors the invasion of white settlers and their theft of Indigenous children:
Mom and Dad. Government hard-working adoptive parents
or, as their nicknames, the mosquito people.
Military action, do-gooders, the church, the takers of blood-kin.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Something happened the day of the welts,
my cord attached to my mother is cut.
Once fasting on Mount Williwaw I was bitten 340 times.
The mosquito bites became welts, festering and bloody.
Ecological trauma joins human-embodied trauma.
Violence to one species, or to one body in one moment, reverberates across the filaments connecting species throughout time. In “Horizon at Duck Camp,” for example, okpik’s speaker recalls:
Like a polar ice bear grinding his teeth
into a seal’s skull. First an old
genetic memory burnishes
in the smell, blood of snow.
These genetic memories are not limited by time or species in Blood Snow. In “It Cuts,” readers watch as “sliced feet drag across razor-burnt snow,” making room for “yellow ice-worms, mosquito larvae, and Steller’s eider.” Later, in “Expedition Mars,” the speaker marvels at the “infectious ash of ghosts” alongside the “minute wonders” of sparrows and cells. “This activity of clinging to life like putting on a parachute,” the speaker relates in “Dear Mommie, (I’m sick).” Across Blood Snow, okpik’s vivid witnessing shows the necessity and courage of, even amid such devastation, choosing to put on a parachute and live, again and again.
While unflinching in its grief and trauma, Blood Snow reminds readers of the beauty and community possible, and in so doing, okpik encourages readers also to choose life. After all, “Stories long as intestines can release buttercups if teased,” okpik writes in “Mind Warp,” and, in “A Lock of Hair,” even “[a] corroded filament of a white bear’s heart / shines in warm snow like frozen fireflies stuck / in the air still yellow.” Sometimes, we see beauty clearest when it is surrounded by violence. See unspooled intestines on the ground. Now, see the buttercups that those intestines, through narrative, bloom.
See the color blue multiply across Blood Snow, depending on who is blue, who is around the blue, and who sees the blue. Blue manifests as (among many other examples) “forgrass little blue,” “black & blue fog,” “a blue / glacial memory,” “whale-grey blue,” “scathing blood-blue,” “pink-tan-blue,” “Picasso’s blues,” “bluest eggs of magpies, cobalt,” and the “blue, lapis / icicle time” of “winter’s blue night.” Blue is neither objective nor universal, but instead perceived in relationship, as okpik’s nuanced attention demonstrates. To perceive is to reach out and connect—even with the most unlikely kindred.
In Blood Snow, the speaker finds connection even with the mosquitoes; in “Song of Blood Mosquito Dance,” the speaker marvels at the female mosquito’s “needle nose like a straw for blood & tool for life” and her call to “Sing to others / in sacredness & grace.” Encouraged by the mosquito to “help others deal or cope / with historical grief or loss,” the speaker finds herself with “wings iridescently whirring,” and like her sister-mosquito, “feeding her eggs while drinking blood, giving life a chance.”
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Recognizing and honoring our multispecies relations, and moving beyond whitestream notions of individual-body or individual-species identity, is central to survival in Blood Snow. No wonder, then, that okpik’s shifting, plural speaker describes herself and her relations as shimmering multispecies convergences. She sees “young-old-women of igneous rock” in “Early Morning Sky Blue Pink,” learns from the “whale-people” in “In a Lock of Hair,” and watches the “crow-person” in “Crows Caw Echo Echo.” She finds “something / of a wing” in the curve of her neck in “Necklaced Whalebone” and finds “bull thistle in my intestines” in “Warm Water Fish Moving In.” She imagines herself to be a “left-eyed flounder” in “Fate Map” and knows that humans might each be “a mockingbird / tangled inside / a body” in “Light Years of Humans.” Angela Rawlings describes “ecolinguistic activism” as a practice where “reading and writing might exist beyond the skin of a page, instead embedded within that skin or flesh of whoever or whatever is deemed the writer,” and okpik’s sensuous entanglements illustrate this ecolinguistic activism. These poems push readers beyond notions of human exceptionalism and into deeper relations with our ecological kin.
So, too, when identity becomes “a wormhole vacuum,” as it is in “She/I Tumble with Old Squaw Duck,” the speaker becomes “a woman of time,” or, elsewhere, someone “not woman or man” but instead a “blossom ball of future-past-present.” Time fractures and multiplies, becoming, as Citizen Potawatomi Nation scholar Kyle Powys Whyte describes, a practice of kinship. Whereas linear models of time (and identity) encourage us to ignore our responsibilities to other beings, creating a false sense of independence, the “kinship time” Whyte describes orients us toward “reciprocity, consent, trust, transparency, and confidentiality.” Through the nonlinear flows of time and identity in Blood Snow, we become more aware of multispecies interdependence. We recognize that we are someone’s ancestor, just as we have ancestors, and ancestral networks extend throughout time.
“The dominant colonial stories about kinship are designed to destroy Indigenous peoples’ ties to our homelands, to one another, and to our other-than-human relatives,” Cherokee Nation scholar Daniel Heath Justice writes, “and ultimately serve to transform those lands into exploitable resources and diverse peoples into memories.” Blood Snow is okpik’s admirable, essential counterargument to such colonial stories and their violent effects. Consider, again, okpik’s title: Blood Snow. Here, there is no snow without blood—past, present, and/or future trauma—but, at the same time, there is no blood without the hope and promise of snow. Blood Snow is filled with life in profuse complexity. Bodies transform within and across species, ideas bloom across languages, and I spirals into She/I, into my/our, into we, and back into an I that is always multiple in body, space, and time. As okpik concludes “Confluence,”
I am human: an ego-syntonic woman;
water; I am contradiction, water & blood
on a page of words joining; meeting; in union;
a collision of squid ink; salmon & paper.
To be syntonic is to be responsive to one’s environment, and okpik, here and across Blood Snow, shows how such relationship emerges through “contradiction,” through “water & blood,” and through poetry. By depicting multispecies networks in poetry, and often offering poetry as a way to bring these knowledges into language, okpik encourages readers—encouragements we need now, and some of the many reasons I am grateful for Blood Snow—to recognize the interdependencies of all life and the necessity of continued listening and continued voice.
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dg nanouk okpik was born in and spent much of her life in Anchorage, Alaska. She attended Salish Kootenai College, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award, the May Sarton Award, and an American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale. Her second book is Blood Snow (Wave, 2022), which was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize.
Lucien Darjeun Meadows was born in Virginia and raised in West Virginia. Author of In the Hands of the River (Hub City Press, 2022), he has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, American Alliance of Museums, American Association of Geographers, and National Association for Interpretation. Lucien is currently a postdoctoral researcher and ultramarathon runner among the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute lands of northern Colorado.