Night Begins with a Question: XXV Austrian Poems Book

Effigies collects the work of four Indigenous poets, selected and introduced by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. dg nanouk okpik is an Inupiat-Inuit from Anchorage Alaska, Cathy Tagnak Rexford is Inupiaq, French/German and English from Anchorage too, Brandy Nalani McDougall, from Upcountry Maui, is of Kanaka Maoli, Chinese and Scottish ancestry, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt, from Hawaii, is of Spanish, Hawaiian and Chinese ancestry. The danger in such a book is exoticization, and it is a danger that poets and editor do not successfully overcome, in my opinion. The problem is knotty: how does one who live among "baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume ... white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu" (from Editor's Note) write about these things without sounding exotic to readers from the American mainland? The best poems in the book treat these wonderful images as background to an unfolding human drama that readers can understand from their own lives. So in "Oblong Moon," Perez-Wendt writes,

The night Harry Pahukoa died
He was driving up from Honomanu
After laying net
He had to lay the net
Before the full moon.

The poem also succeeds in reaching out to the reader because it does not assume that its reader will understand the timing of laying a net. It explains without condescension or servility. The opening is also a skilful exercise of suspense.