Be-Hooved (The Alaska Literary Series) (Paperback)

Mar Ka lives in and writes from the foothills of Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. Be-Hooved, her new poetry collection, creates a layered spiritual memoir of her decades in the northern wilderness. The poems inhabit her surroundings—structured along the seasons and the migration patterns of the Porcupine Caribou Herd—and are wrought with a fine and luminous language.

Entrancing, profound, and startling, this book is a testament to hope before change, persistence before confusion, and empathy before difference: all the world’s light and all the world’s dark / can fit into an eye into a heart.

Mar Ka is an indigenous rights attorney in the foothills of Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and the Midnight Sun Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in national and international journals and anthologies.

“(Ka) writes effortlessly about societal issues without calling them that. She’s precise with every one of her senses. And, so, we become familiar with her heart’s home. The implications of this book are great. Ka describes a world at its pinnacle, fading except for what we’re willing to save.”

“Evok(es) scenes from the remote corners of the state where life obeys its own rhythms and sets of rules. . . . At times, Ka’s style recalls Gertrude Stein, with its repetition of words, slightly altered in sequence each time to find new meaning.”