Dark Traffic: Poems - Paperback

by Joan Naviyuk Kane (Author)

Finalist, 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Dark Traffic creates landmarks through language, by which its speakers begin to describe traumas in order to survive and move through them. With fine detail and observation, these poems work in some way like poetic weirs: readers of Kane's work will see the arctic and subarctic, but also, more broadly, America, and the exigencies of motherhood, indigenous experience, feminism, and climate crises alongside the near-necropastoral of misogyny, violence, and systemic failures. These contexts catch the voice of the poems' speakers, and we perceive the currents they create.

Author Biography

Joan Naviyuk Kane is the author of the poetry collections The Cormorant Hunter's Wife, Hyperboreal, Milk Black Carbon, and Dark Traffic. Her edited volumes include The Griffin Poetry Prize 2017 Anthology and Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic. A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow, Whiting Award winner, and Paul Engle Prize recipient, she's a 2025 United States Artists Fellow based in Oregon, where she's an associate professor at Reed College.