“I’ve always loved Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow and noticed that many filmmakers have used it in their films: Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, etc. I’m attracted to the way it shows different planes of experience in somewhat varying emotional registers existing simultaneously in one space. There’s the foreground of the discouraged hunters, the kinetic community of ice skaters, and this kind of unfathomable, green-gray distance containing what is perhaps my favorite bird in all of painting. I wanted to use the dynamics of the artwork as a starting off point (and perhaps a visual anchor) for a poem that jump-cuts between mediums, sensations, and feelings of purpose or purposelessness. I think it’s an ‘indoors poem’ that wants to be an ‘outdoors poem.’ The title is a misheard Nicki Minaj lyric. In her 2010 song ‘Your Love,’ she says, ‘When I was a geisha he was a samurai.’ I thought for months she was saying ‘glacier’ and was disappointed when someone corrected me. I liked the ideas of glaciers and samurais being connected, which of course they are.”
—Emily Skillings