We both know who believed snow, who denied it,when you finally came to walk me to the river.I forget I am not pure, how littlethat part of the story ever matters.What matters, maybe—how longI have been waiting, and with suchimpatience. At the end I think I will knowwhat pure means, what I meant to insist backinto my blood, whatever it meant to wantto live. Whatever inevitable ruin.Already, for some years, my head has grownheavy and my ear bent towards anotheracross our difficult and shared country, so.Whatever it means, I’m not yours.
First
Joan Naviyuk Kane
Feature Date
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“First” from snow pouring southward past the window by Joan Naviyuk Kane, © 2026. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is the author of The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, Milk Black Carbon, Dark Traffic, and with snow pouring southward past the window. A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, and United States Artists Fellow, she’s received the Whiting Award, Paul Engle Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. She has raised her children in Alaska, Massachusetts, and Oregon, and is Chair and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The poems in with snow pouring southward past the window turn with and for relatives and beloveds across seas and oceans, continents and nations, languages and histories. In this collection, public and personal archives work with literary translations across several dialects of the Inupiaq language, and re-complexify Arctics at a time when empires once again seem interested in flattening and erasing millennia of Indigenous inhabitation, care, and situatedness. It was written between Massachusetts, Inuit Nunaat, Sápmi, the “Old World” and through waves of overlapping pandemics, political and social exigencies, and solidarities.
"These poems move ferociously through landscapes of rupture, wielding exacting, rigorous vocabularies that feel scraped from the wary and hoarfrosted voice of a poet-seer who spares no bullshit: ‘No more I want to go home. No more I want to go into another time. No more want, just need.’ Kane’s word is urgent throughout, marked by an insistent naming of plants, people, places—an act of preservation against all that slips away: ‘gather them—my eyes are brimming with tears.’ Even as everything edges toward loss, this collection builds something lasting and vibrant: ‘for the sorrow to become something islandic. / Someplace we can travel back to together / if we have to, if we make it through these days.’ This book will gut you and sweep you clean."
—Stephanie Adams-Santos
"Joan Kane’s collection, with snow pouring southward past the window, is a brilliant, philosophically informed constellation that masterfully navigates trauma, violence, and grief with extraordinary lyricism. The speaker navigates a complex universe in this singular collection. This series of poems both shows and enacts how a self is brought to being through the abyss."
—Cynthia Cruz
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
