How to Dress a Fish

Chabitnoy’s impressive debut grapples with the legacy of a great-grandfather sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the consequences of colonial erasure. These poems reckon with loss and survival, incorporating primary source texts (boarding school records, redacted fragments of historical and official texts) alongside family photographs and notes responding to Alutiiq language and myth. In “FAMILY GHOSTS HISTORY,” multiple voices (indicated by typography and white space) haunt an official record. In another poem, a box made up of black lines fills most of the page, framed by a description of “A space that unlike a slate can not be written. A moth-eaten hole.” Other poems question who narrates stories and why. The speaker also investigates her own position uncovering a complex heritage as a descendant of U.S. Indian Boarding School policy: “There was just a boy/ and they took from him his words/ so he could not speak with others/ so he could not know there were others.... Can I say these things if I am not that boy?” These poetic reanimations map new possibilities for affinities and kinship, honoring the storyteller and the poet to “take our ears seriously.” (Feb.)