Review by Mindy Kronenberg
So much is summoned in the diminutive but sleek and dark edition of Ex Machina, or perhaps “unleashed” is a better word. The poems in this collection by Joan Naviyuk Kane pulse with language that captures varying energy– floats with incantation-like recitations on the landscape, unfurls in the fragile indignities of womanhood, and hammers at the dilemma of detachment from one’s ancestral legacy. Kane’s narrative versatility can recall Silko or Eliot, and each mesmerizes with its own sense of urgency or cautionary tale, whether within the larger concerns of identity and empowerment, and exist as in an isolated realm. In “Turning Back” (p.10), there’s the tug of broken familial and cultural bonds:
I wished to be closer to my mother
to think of displacement in a different way.
To part the bright green new growth
of a plant she has asked me to gather.
We never imagined so many years apart.
I have no way to make amends.
Set adrift, I wanted to stay near the shore
of something familiar but I trace
the shape of tuqqayuk, sea lovage, wild
celery, with something other than my tongue.
Some poems reach across the page in a disjointed discourse of disclosure and regret, as in “Don’t Run Out” (p.1) and “The Angel of Yelling” (p. 12). In the former, a breathless recollection told with stark dream-like imagery:
real & white as snow
have you forgotten
starting over & over
the swan crossing
with the dark tide
southward to the sound
not too far off
firework & blast
of something hard to reach
& harder to escape
I remember how
without you
a woman’s quarrel
it passes into a quarrel
with no one
And from the latter, an agonizing dialog:
Resiliency exhausts me:
don’t want to be metaphor anymore,
but drum, but map.
I don’t know what you mean by that but don’t really care to find out, either.
How do you process information
& also help people hear
what you literally saw?
I don’t think you should be allowed to date white people.
Plunder,
plunder,
plover.
It’s not your kids’ fault that their mother is an asshole.
Other poems are presented in expansive descriptions or neatly stacked stanzas that are tethered to the page in a totem of images. Two poems appear facing a version in the poet’s native language (Iñupiaq), “Reclamation” (“Saakia,” p.4-5) and “Marrow” (“Patiq,” p,6-7), giving the reader a chance to taste the language and feel the musicality of the words. It enhances the sense of immediacy and urgency in each poem, the first a series of familiar, ordinary items that reads like a chant, and the second that expands into a tale of a diminished landscape, with its own longing and a precious litany of items:
“…Remember how there used to be many birds at the back of the island?// There is an image that has been reflected. I reached the end of it, my limit,/ my destination:/all is depleted. There is nothing left./ No land to be seen anywhere.//Listen to that distant sound: peregrine falcon, red fox, berries & greens growing to profusion from the profuse earth,…”
In Ex Machina, the poems carry the weight and worth of history—personal, ethnic, cultural—and speak in direct and sometimes ineffable ways. “…A poem,/ too, holds secrets it cannot tell” the poet states in a work with a name that reads as a pronouncement (“In Which the Poems & Poets Agree That They are the Result of Choices They Have Made Along the Way,” p. 22)
…& then there are the real poems
where the language creates its own tension.
Where the language reminds us
to create a story and to become part of it,
to stay alive until we come back.
Ex Machina by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Staircase Books, 2023
Mindy Kronenberg is an award-winning poet and writer with hundreds of publication credits world-wide. She teaches writing, literature, and arts subjects at SUNY Empire State University, is the editor of Oberon poetry magazine, and the author of Dismantling the Playground (Birnham Wood), Images of America: Miller Place (Arcadia), and OPEN, an illustrated poetry book (Clare Songbirds Publishers).