A few weeks ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I found myself chatting with a bookseller at the legendary Grolier Poetry Book Shop. I asked for a recommendation, and he put a slim black chapbook in my hands. The silver letters on the cover said Ex Machina and he explained that the author, Joan Naviyuk Kane, had been his professor at Reed College. I’d never heard of the press, Staircase Books, and the bookseller explained that it was a small press he was getting off the ground, with a friend. I bought the beautiful little book, because I love super-small presses and I wanted to support and encourage the initiative. I never imagined I would love the book as much as I do.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is an Indigenous Alaskan of the Inupiaq people. When she won the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship, she was the first Indigenous poet to do so. Two of the poems in Ex Machina appear in this chapbook first in Inupiaq, and then in English on the following page. I don’t know Inupiaq, but that doesn’t stop me from letting my eyes go back and forth from poem to translation. There is a distinct pleasure in saying unfamiliar words out loud.
Naviyuk Kane blends humor and beauty in a way that few poets can. The poem titled “In Which the Poems & Poets Agree That They are the Result of Choices They Have Made Along the Way” begins with the lines, “The silver of the lake caught/ in the net, like a provocation.” These are poems of provocation. They challenge the reader to re-understand her place in the world of machines and in the disruptions of the natural world. “Not bird strike but another old danger, irruptive” writes Naviyuk Kane in the title poem “Ex Machina”.
“On No Longer Being a Carbon-Offset Girlfriend” is perhaps the best title I’ve come across in a long time. The poem itself lives up to it, in a dizzy blend nature and heartbreak. Naviyuk Kane writes, “or nothing like rivers of young ice/ as they flash, dazzling blue-white./ Once, you made me envy you—"
So often people miss out on the delight of chapbooks, preferring a larger book, something with more heft, something with a spine. Consider that a smaller book can be read in the morning when you’re having a cup (or two) of coffee. You can read a chapbook from beginning to end and have a full dose of the music and magic of poetic language before you jump into a day filled with the language of emails and meetings. If you’re new to chapbooks, Ex Machina is a great place to start.
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover.