Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (Ed.), dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall & Mahealani Perez-Wendt

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Biographical note:  Allison Adelle Hedge Coke descends from moundbuilders and is of Cherokee, Huron, Creek, French Canadian, Lorraine, Portuguese, English, Scot, and Irish ascendants. She previously worked horses, fields, waters, and factories, now holds the Distinguished Paul & Clarice Reynolds Endowed Chair of Poetry & Writing at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Previous books include: Dog Road Woman (American Book Award); Off-Season City Pipe; Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer; and Blood Run (Salt Publications). Effigies is her seventh edited edition.

Biographical note:  dg nanouk okpik is an Alaskan Native, Inupiat — Inuit from Anchorage, Alaska. She is a Cook Inlet Region, Inc. shareholder as an enrolled member of federally recognized Tribe. Her family resides in Barrow, Alaska. She has served as secretary on both the American Indian Higher Education Consortium Student Congress and the Student Senate at Salish Kootenai College. dg nanouk okpik is an MFA candidate of Stonecoast, USM.

Biographical note:  Cathy Tagnak Rexford is Inupiaq, French/German and English from Anchorage, Alaska. Most of Cathy's work is inspired by the unique view of the Indigenous peoples of Northern Alaska. She has worked extensively in Native education and language efforts as researcher, curriculum developer and graphic designer. Cathy has also worked on contemporary Native theater and film projects as an actor, producer and writer.

Biographical note:  Brandy Nalani McDougall is a poet of Hawaiian, Chinese and Scottish descent from the island of Maui. An award-winning poet, she has published in journals and anthologies throughout Hawai‘i, the continental U.S. and the Pacific. Her first collection will be released in 2008. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

Biographical note:  Mahealani Perez-Wendt (formerly Mahealani Kamauu) is of Spanish, Hawaiian, and Chinese ancestry. She attended Kalaheo Elementary, Royal Elementary and Central Intermediate Schools, graduating from Kamehameha School for Girls in 1965. She earned a BA in political science and graduate certificate in public administration from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. In 1993, she received the Cades Literary Award. Her first book, Uluhaimalama was published in 2008.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714070
ISBN:  9781844714070
Author:  Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Title:  Effigies
Series:  Earthworks
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jun-09
Extent:  160pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  240 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples steeped in ideologies, practical and philosophic systems, they do not overcome the lingual sensibilities and prowess of the poets representing the areas of the planet present in this text. Instead the poets overcome the intrusion.

From baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume, to white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu, fertile Pacific essence swells these poems into hummock ice knolls, into layers and layers of white sea laps rolling, into mindfulness, consideration, climate care—belonging.

From ulu, to cane knife, where aurora’s green vein bleeds blue and tangles into indigo or green-robed mauna combs t? stalks, palms, kukui, and pines. From Barrow to Waihe’e, tethered and hammered through wild among dark branches and snared by voices, these poems harbor whale and seal oil burning to bring sustenance to a reader’s search for light and with them carry us into a seafaring world of rich embrace. Spectacular, immediate, these beaches and beeches along the shores provide a tactile relationship made immense in their stream-crafted images.

Table of contents:
Contents
Acknowledgements
Editor’s Note
In the time of Okvik
d g nanouk okpik
Mask of Dance
In the time of Okvik
Foist
Ninilchik
Date: Post Glacial
Little Brother and Serpent Sedna
Sinnaktuq
There and Here
Cell Block
The Pact with Sedna
Utkiavik: a Place for Hunting Owls
Oil is a People
Corpse Whale
Palpate Voices
For-the-Spirits-Who-have-Rounded-the-Bend iivaqsaat
Spirit World
Black Ice
Cathy Tagnak Rexford
Luis Gonzalez Palma Never Took a Picture Here
Baleen Scrimshaw as 16 mm Film
Inuit Print
Kinetoscope
The Negative
The Ecology of Subsistence
When Ivory Changes Color from the Oils in Your Skin
Pre-Gunpowder
Here
With a Westwind
Uncle Foot
Baleen Corset
A Caribou Skin Mask
Scripture According to Sila
Migration
Bridge Passage
What is Not Silence
A Wind Drives Over the Waters
Black Ice
Return to the Kula House
Brandy Nalani McDougall
Po
Huaka’i
Haloa Naka
Haumea
Kumuhonua
The History of This Place
The Petroglyphs at Olowalu
Lei Niho Palaoa
Emma, 1993
On Finding My Father’s First Essay, San Joaquin Delta College, 1987
How I Learned to Write My Name
Ma’alaea Harbor, Father’s Day
The Salt-Wind of Waihe’e
The Dream Of Kaha’ula
Turns of Light, the Story of Your Birth
Dirty Laundry
Koa and the Burning of the Kula House
Easter
Return to the Kula House
Cane Spider
Back When We Lived with Ghosts
Kukui
Waiting for the Sunrise at Haleakal?
Red Hibiscus in the Rain
Synaptic Collisions
Ho’ailona
Ka ‘Olelo
Over and Over the Return, Mo’oku’auhau
Papatuanuku
Papahanaumoku
Ma’healani Perez-Wendt
Papahanaumoku
Segmented
Kalalani
Bury Our Hearts at Wal-Mart, etc.
Double Decker
We Are Not the Crime We Are the Evidence
Uprooting
Calvary At ‘Anaeho’omalu
Nancy Kwan
Anna at a Crossroads
Huluhulu Bag
Kipahulu
No Steal
Maile Never Miss
Oblong Moon
Biographical Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Inuit Print
by Cathy Tagnak Rexford

I drop frozen whale skin into
my sister’s fish tank; marbled oil
refracts glass-woven baskets on her dirt floor.

This is the melting point of her lips,
her rice-papered speech,
           her sloping breast, her song.
I brush liquid cobalt
on the edges of her stark white eyelids:
she remembers the tones of old ice,
the way it evaporated in the ocean current.

She wore a brown canvas
fashioned of bleached sealskin
before the rains turned dust into paint.
When she says the word lightning,
the polished baleen-hair brush beneath
her reach seems to ignite.

Steel rods are her memory,
her handwriting, her recurring dream,
          her interruption of light.

Slouching against sinewed fishing line,
she inhales; chokes on the small pebbles
of Ualaqpa; I know her halogen veined
storytelling rote here, fifty below zero.

Unpublished endorsement:  Effigies juxtaposes the distinctive voices and visions of four emerging poets — dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt. In drawing from their Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian cultures and histories, the poems in this book are not an assemblage but a living force and create an intricate, haunting weave.

Arthur Sze

Unpublished endorsement:  What a shape-shifting moment, this release of four lush and necessary voices into the open air. Linked by blood and fevered lyric, dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall and Mahealani Perez-Wendt offer up unapologetic and unflinching lessons that, as okpik says in the astonishing "Corpse Whale," shove "sinew back into the threaded bones of the land." Individually, each of these voices would be a revelation. Collectively, they're a revolution.

Patricia Smith