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Poet, nonfiction writer, and lifelong musician Carolyn Kremers moved to Alaska to teach in the remote Bering Sea coast village of Tununak when she was thirty-four. Her first book,
Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup'ik Eskimo Village (a memoir), probed and celebrated that experience.
Upriver continues the chronicle of Kremers' personal journey deep into Alaska and the human soul. Mixing music, Yup'ik language, the natural world, honesty, and an intimate sense of the spiritual and the unobtainable, Kremers presents a cascade of poems made of beauty and pain. The poems fall into five settings--Tununak, the Interior, Shape-Shifting, Return to the Y-K Delta, and Fairbanks. Like salmon swimming instinctively upriver--toward home--this story confronts what it means and how it feels to love a person or a place, no matter the consequences.
About the author
Carolyn Kremers is a poet, writer, and musician living in a cabin at the edge of Fairbanks, Alaska. She has been artist in residence at the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Denali National Park and Preserve. She is the author of "Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup"'"ik Eskimo Village."
Summary
There is a triumphant and satisfying feeling the first time one returns to a once-unfamiliar place and finally feels like it is home. When strangeness is shed and familiar patterns emerge, there is a sense of comfort that is reward for those who venture into new places. This title is suitable for those who has found a new home beyond the familiar.
