Effigies

dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt are four exceptional emerging poets. Their Pacific Rim relationship invited opportunity to publish these four chapbooks in one collected volume. Like effigy earthworks, stone, and bone carvings, the books included in this volume portray representational imagery as testimonies to the stunning spirit, landscapes, and lives from which these poets derive. A significant statement as to the changing state of the world, this collection is a rich pleasure.

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 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

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