In re-telling the Inuit stories included here, Richard Price opens out remarkable northern vistas and unfamiliar narratives, strange gods, and unforgettable characters. Carol Rumens described Price as a poet who is 'brilliant quietly: inventive, sometimes dazzling, but never merely showy' precisely the talents for rendering, rather than appropriating these great story-cycles of Inuit culture. Here we learn of 'Sedna the Sea Goddess' and 'Kiviuq the Hunter, ' the central protagonists of the book's remarkable stories. They are rich in extraordinary incident. In Sedna's world women can marry dogs and have half-puppy, half-human children; birds beat their wings so hard they call down a storm on a fugitive kayak; walruses originate from...well that would be telling. Each story-cycle abounds in natural wonder, celebrating our creaturely relations with our fellow inhabitants of land and sea. 'The Old Woman Who Changed Herself into a Man, ' a short narrative, bridges the major sequences, telling the story of an older woman and a younger one who become lovers in the isolation of their remote home.