This image is the cover for the book Open the Dark

Open the Dark

“Tozier’s first book of poems clearly is emplaced in family, community, geography, history, and the seasonality of animals and plants in Western Alaska.” —Elizabeth Bradfield, author ofToward Antarctica

Open the Dark is an exquisite collection of poems depicting a generational tapestry woven with the shared ebb and flow of land and sea and time. Loving hands, dyed sweet with raspberries and lingonberries, pass ancestral knowledge—of the hunt for seal and crab to pressing ironless, ruler-straight seams—from grandmother to mother, mother to daughter. This is a collection that beckons, like a mother’s warm embrace, into the vibrant scent and taste of Iñupiaq Alaska.

“A lyrical guide to the life in Northwest Alaska experienced by the Iñupiaq poet and her family . . . Like most books of good poems, it is also a gallery of images for revisiting time after time.” —49 Writers

“These deceptively simple poems enlarge with repeated readings; they unfold greater meaning each time and leave a reader with much to contemplate about identity, cultures, generational wisdom, and values. Marie Tozier’s fresh voice is a very welcome addition to Alaskan, Indigenous and American literature.” —Anchorage Daily News

Marie Tozier

Marie Tozier is an Inupiaq poet whose work has been published in the Cirque and Yellow Medicine Review. She is an adjunct instructor for UAF Northwest Campus and has taught sewing, quilting, knitting and qiviut processing, and writing classes. She is also a contributor to the Anchorage Daily News. During her low-residency MFA at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, Tozier focused on identity in poetry. As a staff member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she took part in the Robert Wood Johnson Global Solutions Partnership, which allowed Tozier to visit Aotearoa (New Zealand) and learn about Maori education and culture. She also appeared on an episode of the US version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? in October 2000. She was the first Alaskan contestant to make it past the “Fastest Finger First” round and to play in the hot seat. Tozier lives in Nome, Alaska, with her husband and children.

Boreal Books