publication SAMPLER
Look at this blue
Look at this blue
Finalist, 2022 National Book Award landscapes and internment camps and everywhere else. It reminds us of the extinct Xerces blue butterfly and, page after page, of the endangered ones: delta smelt, riparian woodrat, Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, Mono Lake diving beetle, finback whale, a list that, as it grows, becomes profound, tragic
Finalist, 2022 National Book Award landscapes and internment camps and everywhere else. It reminds us of the extinct Xerces blue butterfly and, page after page, of the endangered ones: delta smelt, riparian woodrat, Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, Mono Lake diving beetle, finback whale, a list that, as it grows, becomes profound, tragic, gorgeous, overwhelming, and eventually a song. But a song not to be sung without the accompanying verses of greed and power, of politics, massacre, incarceration, exclusion. Not even the missing are missing: we are all included. The title repeats through the text as a chorus, a towline to hang on to, at one point referring to the chance mutation of coyote eye color, at another, the Hidden Lake bluecurl flower, fifty of which will fit on a penny. This is a book for the world we currently inhabit, the long unstoppable chaos, the season of losing everything we love. Listen. Let yourself belong. ‘Recite their names now,’ Hedge Coke asks us, coaxes us, dares us in her clear voice, unafraid. And then she names an appendix of resource links: ‘do the work.’”
Winner, Emory Elliott Book Award
Finalist, Firecracker Award CLMP
Finalist, ASLE Environmental Book Award
Finalist, National Book Award
BEST BOOK TO READ TO IMPRESS YOUR FRIENDS/DATE/PARENTS/POSTAL WORKER
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s Look At This Blue because it’s impressively smart, terrifyingly relevant, and hugely impactful.
Book Award Categories We Wish Existed
Anne Mai Yee Jansen Aug 7, 2023
Book Riot
Interweaving elegy, indictment, and hope into a love letter to California, Look at This Blue examines America’s genocidal past and present to warn of a future threatened by mass extinction and climate peril.
Truths about what we have lost and have yet to lose permeate this book-length poem by American Book Award winner and Fulbright scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. An assemblage of historical record and lyric fragments, these poems form a taxonomy of threatened lives—human, plant, and animal—in a century marked by climate emergency. Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America’s continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke’s cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance.
POETRY BY ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE
MARCH 29, 2022 • 6 X 9 • 168 PAGES • 978-1-56689-620-7
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, a Fulbright scholar, First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award recipient, Thomas Wolfe Prize, recent Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals, and U.S. Library of Congress Witter Bynner fellow, has written seven books of poetry, one book of nonfiction, and a play. Following former fieldworker retraining in Santa Paula and Ventura in the mid-1980s, she began teaching, and she is now a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Hedge Coke is the editor of ten anthologies and has served as an editor and guest editor for several magazines and journals, most recently World Literature Today. The social media hashtag #poempromptsforthepandemic hosts hundreds of original prompts she crafted as public outreach during the COVID-19 pandemic. A career community advocate and organizer, she most recently directed UCR’s Writers Week, the Along the Chaparral/Pūowaina project, and the Sandhill Crane Migration Retreat and Festival.
PRAISE FOR LOOK AT THIS BLUE
“An impressive lyrical accounting of California’s biodiversity that also serves as a preemptive elegy for these plants, animals, and human beings, given the current climate crisis. . . . A hypnotic assembly of discordant parts. As it bears witness to the wonders of one continental coast, Look at This Blue asks us all to face our world together.” —Diego Báez, Poetry Foundation
“Its reportage and proximity to history reminded me of Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria, of Collier Nogues’s The Ground I Stand on Is Not My Ground, of Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, and of Claudia Rankine’s incomparable Citizen: An American Lyric. I wouldn’t be the first to hear the voluminous and ecstatic witness of Whitman in Hedge Coke’s work, either. . . . Music is one of Hedge Coke’s great gifts. Smart, subtle, texturous.” —Emily Vizzo, World Literature Today
“What Hedge Coke provides readers in the pages that follow is the lightning rod. Her long poem slips in and out of images of violence against the land, specifically California, the flora and fauna and many immigrants and indigenous peoples of that land, the poor and cast out and overlooked and neglected and abused of that land, ever aware of the undercurrents that connect each transgression. While I’ve grown suspicious that one can give voice to the voiceless without doing further violence, these lines are not acts of ventriloquism, nor even quiet moments of witnessing. These are the aftershocks of the violences we as a nation would not see, haunting the periphery until there is nowhere we can look without being made at last to see. But in this litany of those who have been lost and those who are at risk, so too there is an act of preservation, a summons, and offering. If not promise, then a charge, a spark, to move us along. This book is like nothing I’ve seen from Hedge Coke before. It was just what I needed to read right now.” —Abigail Chabitnoy, Orion Magazine
“Here is a lifetime, relentless, inviting us bravely to sit in a circle facing the fire, speaking. Allison’s new collection covers her poetic depth and practice: travels, research, vision and visions, her wide wingspan—saving the people, the planet, and creatures. It is timely as all her books have been through the decades. Yet, the approach is radical, experimental. She meditates and dances through the trails of the text. Love and suffering, document and lyrical flight, human core and cosmic interrelationship, woman’s body and explosive mind. A prizewinner all the way. A warm, true heart.” —Juan Felipe Herrera
“Song from both above and within a texture of bad change, imbued with beauty, being in and of nature. This language, these careful lines, implicates us all as bits of process of extinction, violent—humans, together with the Xerces blue butterfly and California’s so many other spectacular species, lovingly named. Voices, vegetation, animals, human recall and event, like scratchings or petroglyphs. Who’s speaking? The record. A gorgeous, scary poem.” —Alice Notley
“Both ode and elegy for our natural and man-made environments, Allison Hedge Coke’s Look at This Blue speaks of California’s inevitable loss, its ‘temporal melt,’ its ‘death-wish façade.’ Hedge Coke calligraphies this tragedy and mythos with such poignance that you will be riveted until the collection’s very last line. Look at This Blue is not only timely; it is necessary.” —Lynne Thompson
“How blue are you? Xerces-butterfly blue, coyote-eye blue, lake blue, Mission blue: this is the blue of beauty and the blue of grief. Look at This Blue is a necessary reckoning with the ongoing, disastrous, criminal genocide perpetuated in the Golden State, amongst the beauty and riches of its landscape. As Hedge Coke writes, the poem is ‘the offering we make.’” —Eleni Sikelianos
“Allison Adelle Hedge Coke sings California with a garden of images, all life, named and splendidly watered by bewitching words—but this is no romantic paean. She documents genocide, massacres, slavery, arsons, lies, the laments of the pushed out and knocked down. Here’s the hardest truth, wrapped in lyric.” —Luis J. Rodríguez
“Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s Look at This Blue is a song for California: a poem as big, as diverse, as ambitious as the state it celebrates. Or do I mean the state it eulogizes? Or do I mean the state whose histories it sets straight? Or do I mean the state this poem seeks to save? Or do I mean the state of the poet whose story is part and parcel of the story of this same state in all its grim and glorious broken beauty? Yes, I mean these things and more. Much more. This is a poem whose borders extend beyond geography and territory and history. This is a poem to be lived.” —Dean Rader
“Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is one of the most important and innovative environmental writers of our time. Look at This Blue urgently asks us to see the wondrous biodiversity of the planet amidst the violent ravages of colonialism, capitalism, and ecological imperialism. Throughout, this cyclical poem sows dreams of a ‘bettering world’ where our relationships with the earth and more-than-human species are replenished through justice, protection, and love.” —Craig Santos Perez
“From Ishi to Riverside fairy shrimp, from sandhill cranes to vast human damage, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke calls out and calls to California in Look at This Blue. The book is a poem is a list, naming the eighty-four who died in the Camp Fire in Paradise, the millions killed in their native landscapes and internment camps and everywhere else. It reminds us of the extinct Xerces blue butterfly and, page after page, of the endangered ones: delta smelt, riparian woodrat, Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, Mono Lake diving beetle, finback whale, a list that, as it grows, becomes profound, tragic, gorgeous, overwhelming, and eventually a song. But a song not to be sung without the accompanying verses of greed and power, of politics, massacre, incarceration, exclusion. Not even the missing are missing: we are all included. The title repeats through the text as a chorus, a towline to hang on to, at one point referring to the chance mutation of coyote eye color, at another, the Hidden Lake bluecurl flower, fifty of which will fit on a penny. This is a book for the world we currently inhabit, the long unstoppable chaos, the season of losing everything we love. Listen. Let yourself belong. ‘Recite their names now,’ Hedge Coke asks us, coaxes us, dares us in her clear voice, unafraid. And then she names an appendix of resource links: ‘do the work.’” —Molly Fisk
“Holding this book in your hand, you catch the scent of high desert salvia and a whiff of charred ancient forests. Pyrocumulus loom over this text, an assemblage in the vein of Juan Felipe Herrera and C. D. Wright, etched in chants of forewarning and loss. Hedge Coke’s reckoning with the genocide of the Indigenous and the mass extinction of endemic species bares the roots of conflagration throughout ‘Indian Country, California, every bit.’ Look at This Blue is itself a blue flame that comes to us in time.” —Sesshu Foster
“Look at This Blue is a fiercely pulsating journey of love and despair. The earth crackles, the body heaves in these wrenching snapshots of personal, historical, and environmental disasters. You want to look away, but you can’t, as Allison Hedge Coke chronicles all the ways we are broken, our bone-deep griefs. Above and beneath these losses, she offers us singular joys: the trill of sandhill cranes, a girl with ‘eyes the green of August,’ small porpoises that ‘undulate in air.’ A list of resources at the end urges us toward the work of survival. We are still on the hook.”—Diana García
“In Look at This Blue, Allison Hedge Coke pulls us into a meditation on the entangled history of California’s ecological and racial catastrophes, which shape the place’s past and present. In an unapologetic disquisition focused on the actualities of California’s Indigenous peoples and their land, Hedge Coke lays bare the course that made way to the burning, flooding, splintering realities that shape California today. Both astonishing and piercing, hopeful and solemn, Look at This Blue plunges the reader into the fractal distortion of seeing the sun from underneath the water. This is a poem of urgency, of sorrow and memory, a call for us to see anew and change the destructive path we’re on before we are all consumed by it.” —Matthew Shenoda
effigies iii
Look at this blue
SALT PUBLISHING, UK 2019
SYNOPSIS
Edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brandy Nālani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez
The Effigies series has woven a vibrant tapestry of indigenous poets from Native North America and the Pacific. As the third in this series, the first co-edited edition, this anthology continues this weaving with the work of
SALT PUBLISHING, UK 2019
SYNOPSIS
Edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brandy Nālani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez
The Effigies series has woven a vibrant tapestry of indigenous poets from Native North America and the Pacific. As the third in this series, the first co-edited edition, this anthology continues this weaving with the work of four emerging Pacific islander women poets from Guam, Hawai’i, and Fiji. Despite their distant origins, all these writers explore culture, history, politics, genealogy, feminism, and the environment. They each have their own unique style, ranging from the lyric to the avant-garde. Overall, they represent the next resurgent wave of empowered and decolonial Pacific writers.
No‘u Revilla (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi), Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi), Kisha Borja-Quichocho-Calvo (Chamoru), and Tagi Quolouvaki (Fijian, Tongan) take readers into the vast Pacific ocean to swim beyond the reef in high tide, out to where the water meets the sky, only to circle back to the islands to taste the tears and sweat in coconut and guava, the smell of frangipani on the wind. Amidst such beauty, these poets also carry us into darkness with tremendous power and vulnerability, laying bare the ravages of colonialism—the brutal occupation of country, the violence waged against Native women and girls, the erosion of language and ancestral memory, and the forced disconnections from land, ocean, and other healing lifeways. Effigies III features four debut books that fearlessly journey through these home-islands in ways that will transform and empower.
PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK
‘To read Effigies III, a new collection of Indigenous poetry by Pacific Islander women, is to taste the sweet life giving water of a fountainhead of Oceania writing, with the bitter earth of the fight against colonialism in its many forms in the Pacific Islands. Kisha Borja-Quichocho-Calvo describes American hegemony, in island territories and Native American lands, as a He'e, an octopus, and encourages us to “sharpen our teeth, / and bite the fuck out / of the / He'e.” She writes about being Miss Guam Tourism, but her “dågan can barely fit into a bikini.” She writes about colonial perceptions, as in “We're too stupid, / too dirty, / too poor. // small, / little, / tiny. // Too / Micronesian.” Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio has “forgotten my own grandparents middle names / Forgotten what color thread god used to sew me together with.” Her writings speak to the anti-colonial struggle of Native Hawaiian / Kanaka 'Oiwi for sovereignty, when “Sometimes / we are only / the song / the promise / the faint memory of a sweet melody / the mo'olelo for the next generation to carry.” The poetry of Tagi Qolouvaki sings “like the music of bone flutes.” But in her sensuous embodiments of desire is the caveat that “sugar is the blood of girmityas, itaukei and blackbirding slaves from vanuatu and the solomons to fatten the pockets of settlers and the native elite sugar is sacred dovu made toxic through refinement and poisoning the vanua”. For No'u Revilla “the pretty is in pieces all over the floor.” Beauty is inescable in her writing, “To the girl holding the / faucet in her hands // like a wand, like a good / witch: I left my dress in the // sink for you...” And then she tells us, “Sometimes I feel like 13,796 feet. / But sometimes I feel like choking.” referring to the Kanaka 'Oiwi struggle to honor the sacredness of Mauna Kea. Revilla tell us, “I am the daughter of fishermen. / Born part-bait, sent to sea. // There is no weeping in salt water.” Effigies III is a book about language, a hybrid between English and the Moana/Pacific, in the voices of women who are re-claiming the Indigenous Pacific Islands. As Qolouvaki writes “Old words will change their meanings. Perhaps, if I swallow then spit out salt water, / Sweetened by my breath / Quickened by my heartbeat / Swirled over my tongue / Just so … // aue … oiaue … // Perhaps I will recover lost words // aue … oiaue …”’ —Dan Taulapapa McMullin
‘The voices that gather here, in Effigies III, take shape and rhythm from the ocean itself. Chamoru, Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, Fijian and Tongan, these poets of Oceania speak of and for the waters and all its relatives with perceptive, critical and lyrically stunning undulations. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio’s beating of the sharkskin drum echoes a heartbeat found in Kisha Borja-Quichocho-Calvo’s letters to her young Chamoru daughter, and Tagi Qolouvaki’s stories of home and forgotten gods sing alongside No’u Revilla’s wonderfully rich exhortations, ablutions and incantations. Indigenous Oceania is gathering, and its daughters’ voices are at the forefront of positive change for the future of its islands, waters, and people.’ —Lehua M. Taitano, author of A Bell Made of Stones and Inside Me an Island
‘Effigies III gathers work “rooted 2000 generations deep” in the homelands of these Pacific Islands’ women. A stunning collection of poetry that privileges Native knowledge, language, mapping, and gods over those imposed by colonizers, it is filled with the sacred and everyday fruits of these environments: lush images of traditional foods and medicines from fresh coconut to kava roots; home figured as mountain ranges like Ko‘olau and the treasured “latte stone huts;” and the “blue skin” of ocean ultimately indivisible from the human bodies who belong to these islands and the several Indigenous languages they speak—an ocean that “spills vowels” in these poems. But for all the poetic beauty of this collection, we should not mistake the vision or intention of these women. The work here stands as an effort to “sit in history” and to recite a “geneology of protest.” The poems unmask environmental destruction—“the god choking concrete” and islands “fracked by GMO farming / Geothermal drilling” by those who worship “dollar bill idols.” Ultimately, these words “connect us to our past” and thus “shield … our children” from the contemporary capitalistic “wildfire” that endangers us.’ —Kimberly Blaeser, author of Apprenticed to Justice, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16
Collections: 2019 New Titles, All, Author: Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Books VAT Zero Rated, Poetry anthologies (various poets)
Category: Extent: 176pp, Format: Paperback, Publication Date: 15-Feb-19, Publication Status: Active, Series: Earthworks, Subject: Poetry anthologies (various poets), Trim Size: 216 x 138mm
Type: Book
burn
Written in the midst of 2011 range fires and climate change pummeling the Southwest and the region around Marfa, Texas.
Cover art and interior illustrations by
Dustin Illetewahke Mater
Opening on a “Cattle carcass still steaming,” Hedge Coke’s poetry collection Burn is a highly visual chronicle of destruction and what survives. And yet even
Written in the midst of 2011 range fires and climate change pummeling the Southwest and the region around Marfa, Texas.
Cover art and interior illustrations by
Dustin Illetewahke Mater
Opening on a “Cattle carcass still steaming,” Hedge Coke’s poetry collection Burn is a highly visual chronicle of destruction and what survives. And yet even seeing is susceptible to the blaze. If there’s anything we learn from Burn, it’s that fire singes everything in the end.
—Caroline Hagood, author of Lunatic Speaks and Making Maxine's Baby, in the Kenyon Review
Burn is relentless. A smoldering, ceaseless, fever voice that tells of a consuming rage destroying mountains, bats, 150 head of Black Angus—even the water isn’t safe. Masterfully written by a poet in her prime.
—LeAnne Howe, author of Shell Shaker, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, and forthcoming Savage Conversations
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s stunning work never disappoints. She writes the consuming fire–always on the original edge of remaking.
—Jan Beatty, author of The Switching/Yard and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems
Necessary illumination, visionary healing, groundbreaking and timely.
—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States
MADHAT PRESS, ASHEVILLE
Published 2017
streaming
SING POETRY FROM THE INDIGENOUS AMERICAS
Cover photo by Melissa Groo
loss, memory, and the fate of the planet –
2016 Library of CongressWitter Bynner Fellow,
Selected by Juan Felipe Herrera
Winner: 2015 Wordcrafter of the Year Award
Bronze Medal: 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards for poetry
Winner: 2015 PEN Southwest Award for Poetry
Finalist: 2015 Eric Hoffer Award
Finalist
Cover photo by Melissa Groo
loss, memory, and the fate of the planet –
2016 Library of CongressWitter Bynner Fellow,
Selected by Juan Felipe Herrera
Winner: 2015 Wordcrafter of the Year Award
Bronze Medal: 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards for poetry
Winner: 2015 PEN Southwest Award for Poetry
Finalist: 2015 Eric Hoffer Award
Finalist: 2015 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award for superior cover art.
Finalist: 2015 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal for most thought-provoking book.
Longlist: 2015 PEN Open Book Award
Split This Rock recommended poetry books of 2014
Teaching for Change recommended books of 2014
POETRY BY ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE
DECEMBER 2, 2014 • 6 X 9 • 168 PAGES • 978-1-56689-375-6
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS, December 2, 2014
Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. TO PURCHASE THIS TITLE FOR USE WITH A SCREEN READER PLEASE CALL (612) 338-0125 OR EMAIL US AT INFO@COFFEEHOUSEPRESS.ORG.
“We should be grateful to Allison Hedge Coke for compiling, with her poetry, notes about a world that will be unfamiliar to a generation living one hundred years from now. By that time, the nature that she describes will have all but vanished. It’s as though the earth itself was dictating its biography to her.” —Ishmael Reed
"Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's fierce new poetry collection, Streaming, takes her always brave and startling sonics into new narrative spaces. These poems are full of needful improvisation and piano runs. Hedge Coke makes music from tornados and glyphs, from cranes spiraling overhead, and from the grumbling stomachs of hungry children. She sings these stories because she has to and because we need her to. And when the speaker in “Sudden Where” says “maybe we’d find something magnificent, give it up to make somebody happy,” it is clear that in these urgent poems, and in this necessary book, we've found both the magnificent and the unforgettable."—Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke
“Her poems beg to be read aloud, a jumble of hard sounds that wind their way into an effortless melody. . . . Streaming is truly an accomplishment.” —Summerset Review
“The poems come toward us from a museum of abundance; but museums are filled with relics and this poetry is purely fluid. Everything is moving, changing, and growing, disintegrating and rejuvenating for its own purposes.” The Washington Independent Review of Books
“Hedge Coke does not just endeavor to show the world as it is; she encourages readers of diverse backgrounds, to resist its inherent prejudices, and to effect positive change within it. . . . A poet with feet in the river, even as her head rests on a mountain top.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Erudite and complex . . . Reading it, you can feel the rhythmic propulsion of each image as surely as you can feel your own pulse.” —The Rumpus
“[Streaming] reveals to us a mature poet of imagery whose sonics have shifted toward a be-bop poetics, in which rich, complex sound-patterns are essential to the collection’s meaning-making and emotional impact.” —World Literature Today
“Streaming, is an elegant collaboration between poetry and music.” —Hawaii Review
“Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s new collection Streaming is a veritable symphony, her poems embracing musicality and dissonance like the best of modern composers.” —Largehearted Boy
“By uniting the poems through imagery, language, and movement, Allison Adele Hedge Coke creates more than a collection of poems. Streaming is a continuous trail of light, a steady flow music from the heart of the motherland.” —Green Mountains Review
“A brilliant and brave new collection of poems that irrevocably alters our conventional notion of what constitutes narrative space.” —The Journal (West Virginia)
“Each poem has its own rhythm that meshes into that of the collection overall, a body greater than the sum of its parts, an organism alive with language.” —AskMen
“If the history of the Americas is a body of stories, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s Streaming is most definitely its life-blood. This glorious book journeys through the bittersweet relationships between personhood and nation, nationhood and nature, and nature and culture, bearing witness to each entity’s determined struggle, each entity’s hard-won triumph: ‘colonization,/ construction, that morning, this day,/ every beam in balance despite horror /in the world.’ Streaming’s elegant verse will ‘sing you home into yourself and back to reason.’” —Rigoberto González
“Streaming must possess you. It is not enough to own the volume. It is not enough to read it. For this book is really a chronicle, a memorial, a eulogy for the Earth as we know her before she collapsed in front of our astonished eyes.” —Red Paint Hill
“A rich collection that speaks to our experiences with the world. . . . [A collection] so beautiful that many times it feels as if the poems are singing.” —Dr. TJ Eckleburg Review
“Streaming, is an elegant collaboration between poetry and music.” —Hawaii Review
“Hedge Coke is a poet with a remarkable voice.” —The Volta
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s books include Streaming, Burn, Blood Run, Off-Season City Pipe, Dog Road Woman, Sing, Effigies, Effigies II, and Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. Awards include an American Book Award, a King-Chavez-Parks Award, 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award NWCA, 2016 Pen Southwest Award in Poetry, the 2016 Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship, and 2017 Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is a contributing editor for Black Renaissance Noire and Kore Press, directs the annual Literary Sandhill CraneFest & Retreat and is a Zoeglossia board member. A founding faculty of the VCFA MFA in Writing & Publishing program, Hedge Coke is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside. She came from working fields, factories, and waters and is currently at work directing a climate change documentary.
effigies ii
SING POETRY FROM THE INDIGENOUS AMERICAS
SING POETRY FROM THE INDIGENOUS AMERICAS
A compilation of five debut books by
Laura Da', Ungelbah Davila, Kristi Leora,
Lara Mann, Kateri Menominee
as edited by Allison Hedge Coke
Salt Publishing, UK 2014
AIROS Book-of-the-Month
These five first books join to represent a freshly emerging 21st Century Indigenous Mainland poetry. This collection releases a reader into parallel spaces of
A compilation of five debut books by
Laura Da', Ungelbah Davila, Kristi Leora,
Lara Mann, Kateri Menominee
as edited by Allison Hedge Coke
Salt Publishing, UK 2014
AIROS Book-of-the-Month
These five first books join to represent a freshly emerging 21st Century Indigenous Mainland poetry. This collection releases a reader into parallel spaces of Native culture as diverse as the US-occupied landscapes they embody; the desert Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes Region, Kansas and Oklahoma, bringing a bit of urban and rural symphony by resisting folds into Americana with courageous unfolding imagery in a serious range of departure. Five debut books present a fistful of furious nature, supple with beauty and brilliance and packing the punch intentional poetry delivers. This is a fearless collection of evocative and challenging verse. Effigies II is a road trip through Indian Country with five American Indian women poets who bring it all back home.
“The Tecumseh Motel traces a parallel path of Shawnee culture and personal history. Spanning from the period of Indian Removal to the present, this text lyrically examines identity, generational memory, and the importance of place.” —LAURA DA
“This book explores the images of the American West. From the neon light of honky tonk barrooms to the Southwestern landscape to the railroad, dirt roads and grandmothers’ living rooms.” —UNGILBAH DAVILA
“A narrative through wrenching spaces in the life of one descendant wrestling with post apocalyptic identity, grounded by persistently supportive ancestors and helpers determined to see their blood survive and resist colonial assimilation through disembodiment” —KRISTI LEORA
PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK
‘“I want my ink to bellow,” Shawnee poet Laura Da’ writes, and in Effigies II, series editor Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has gathered ink that bellows—and soothes and whispers and rants and hums and moans and rocks. In this gathering of “survivors who remember / where they come from,” we find beautifully-built poems in many kinds of language, from “mad-house logic” to “the language of the deer,” from “the subtle semantics of Shawnee” to a La Bajada love song. These poems travel the world from Nanih Waiya to Sacre-Coeur, from the brutal world of the twelve Caesars of ancient Rome to Caesar’s Palace, from The Inari Temple to kitchi kabekong, from Peer Gynt to Buck Owens, from the world of two women firing a Ruger 270 at beer cans in the headlights to “the woods, the remote quiet in the deep of them." Good editing (like good mothering), as Hedge Coke casually defines it in her introduction, is “reveling in what they bring bursting in.” Readers, the door just banged open. Prepare to revel.’ —Jon Davis, author of Preliminary Report and Scrimmage of Appetite
‘From within the pages of Effigies II the essential aspect of light from our indgenous poetics burns brilliant. Lara Mann's impeccable & evocative poems give rise to Davila's ironic modernities, Menominee's archetypal homages, Leora's prescient renderings of the seventh-generation's silhouettes, and finally, the magnificently weighted lines of Laura Da'.’ —Joan Naviyuk Kane, author of The Cormorant Hunter's Wife, Hyperboreal, and Then the World Was Milk
‘Allison Hedge Coke has done it again, with her keen ear and eye: brought powerful new Native women's voices to our attention. Rigorous, powerful, brave, haunting, spirited. These collections are a refreshing antidote to any old cynical poetry tropes. Cheers all around.’ —Anne Waldman, author of The Iovis
Trilogy, Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur
‘These poems, fresh effigies carved by five young Native women cracked open my heart. Read them when alone carefully swaddled in a warm blanket, or read them aloud at the kitchen table to all your relations, past and future. But read them. Glorious, rich with imagery, potent to the last page!’ —LeAnne Howe, author of Evidence of Red and Choctalking on Other Realities
‘Allison Hedge Coke has done it again, with her keen ear and eye: brought powerful new Native women's voices to our attention. Rigorous, powerful, brave, haunting, spirited. These collections are a refreshing antidote to any old cynical poetry tropes. Cheers all around.’ —Anne Waldman, author of The Iovis Trilogy, Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur
‘In Effigies II we are introduced to a subtle and striking set of new Indigenous voices. The five poets represented here give readers a window into the nuanced range of contemporary Native poetry and the complex polyphonic lives that work to (re)define a contemporary Indigenous identity. Each of these poets establishes themselves in a defiant domain of fluidity, unwilling to settle for staid and hardened definitions of indigeneity.’ —Matthew Shenoda, author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone
REVIEWS OF THIS BOOK
‘Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - August Book of the Month: “Effigies II”
Effigies II is a compilation of works from Native women poets. Editor Allison Hedge Coke says debuting these works in a collection gives these Native writers a chance to enter the literary publishing world as a community. The book is like a road trip through Indian Country through words. The poems allow the reader to experience a multi-regional view on Native life. We invite you join us live as we take in the words of Laura Da’ (Eastern Shawnee), Ungelbah Davila (Diné), Kristi Leora (Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg), Laura Mann (Choctaw/Cherokee/Mohawk) and Kateri Menominee (Bay Mills Tribe of Chippewa).’ —Native America Calling
Collections: All, Author: Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Books VAT Zero Rated, Poetry anthologies (various poets)
Category: Extent: 260pp, Format: Paperback, Publication Date: 04-Jul-14, Publication Status: Active, Subject: Poetry anthologies (various poets), Trim Size: 216 x 140mm
Type: Book
SING POETRY FROM THE INDIGENOUS AMERICAS
SING POETRY FROM THE INDIGENOUS AMERICAS
SING POETRY FROM THE INDIGENOUS AMERICAS
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (Editor)
National Book Critics Circle Best Books
AIROS Book of the Month
Editor and poet Allison Adelle Hedge Coke assembles this multilingual collection of Indigenous American poetry, joining voices old and new in songs of witness and reclamation. Unprecedented in scope, Sing gathers more than eighty poets from a
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (Editor)
National Book Critics Circle Best Books
AIROS Book of the Month
Editor and poet Allison Adelle Hedge Coke assembles this multilingual collection of Indigenous American poetry, joining voices old and new in songs of witness and reclamation. Unprecedented in scope, Sing gathers more than eighty poets from across the Americas, covering territory that stretches from Alaska to Chile—emerging and acclaimed—from regions underrepresented in anthologies.
They write from disparate zones and parallel experience, from lands of mounded earthwork long-since paved, from lands of ancient ball courts and the first great cities on the continents, from places of cold, from places of volcanic loam, from zones of erased history and ongoing armed conflict, where “postcolonial” is not an academic concept but a lived reality. As befits a volume of such geographical inclusivity, many poems here appear in multiple languages, translated by fellow poets and writers like Juan Felipe Herrera and Cristina Eisenberg.
Hedge Coke’s thematic organization of the poems gives them an added resonance and continuity, and readers will appreciate the story of the genesis of this project related in Hedge Coke’s deeply felt introduction, which details her experiences as an invited performer at several international poetry festivals. Sing is a journey compelled by the exploration of kinship and the desire for songs that open “pathways of return.”
“Many of the poems in this ambitious collection remind us why we read poetry at all—to be returned to the elemental, to relish the beauty of repetition and variation, and to hear the cries of singular voices, of the daring announcement of their individuality.”—Billy Collins
“This dynamic and useful anthology not only is groundbreaking, but also forces those in poetic circles of power to rethink what poetry is about, how we are influenced by what is published and what is not, and how the true meaning of poetry comes from taking powerful artistic action to ensure that the road of poetry in our lives takes a new turn.”—Bloomsbury Review
“In what can only be called a historical anthology of Indigenous poets from the Americas, Allison Hedge Coke has given us a stunning gift that is splendid because of the brilliance of the individual and eclectic poems collected, but richer for the coherent collective song that the anthology represents. This is a big fat book of endless pleasures that helps us to re-imagine America!”—Kwame Dawes, editor of Prairie Schooner
“This collection is an entrance into that part of ‘America’ without which there no real America and not even a real United States. It is a bravura collection, a long-needed Anthology ‘of those antediluvian descendants of the Western hemisphere.’”—Amiri Baraka
“Hedge Coke worked to illuminate the important work of poets of diverse backgrounds and heritage.”—Poetry from the Plains
“Allison Hedge Coke has assembled a multilingual feast of songs, bringing together established and emerging Indigenous poets in South, Central, and North America. With poems presented in their original languages, this anthology is a groundbreaking collection.”—Arthur Sze, author of The Ginkgo Light
“What a diverse feast of poetry! Indigenous poets from Peru, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Canada as well as the United States serve up delicious unforgettable poems. A good number of the poems are composed in Indigenous languages which make this collection especially valuable.”—Leslie Marmon Silko
NOTE: a third of this collection was gathered from an earlier edition Hedge Coke edited for To Topos Poetry International, Ahani. To Topos: Poetry International was founded by Roger Weaver, and edited (at the time of this anthology) by Joseph Ohmann-Krause and Eric Wayne Dickey; Allison Adelle Hedge Coke served as guest editor for those issues, and credited both of the magazine editors as associate-editors for giving her the opportunity to call for and curate the anthology, and brought in Travis Hedge Coke as an assistant editor for the undertaking she met on Sing.
effigies
blood ruN
blood ruN
Edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
AIROS Book of the Month
Salt Publishing, UK, 2009
SYNOPSIS
It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens
Edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
AIROS Book of the Month
Salt Publishing, UK, 2009
SYNOPSIS
It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples steeped in ideologies, practical and philosophic systems, they do not overcome the lingual sensibilities and prowess of the poets representing the areas of the planet present in this text. Instead the poets overcome the intrusion.
From baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume, to white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu, fertile Pacific essence swells these poems into hummock ice knolls, into layers and layers of white sea laps rolling, into mindfulness, consideration, climate care--belonging.
From ulu, to cane knife, where aurora’s green vein bleeds blue and tangles into indigo or green-robed mauna combs t? stalks, palms, kukui, and pines. From Barrow to Waihe’e, tethered and hammered through wild among dark branches and snared by voices, these poems harbor whale and seal oil burning to bring sustenance to a reader’s search for light and with them carry us into a seafaring world of rich embrace. Spectacular, immediate, these beaches and beeches along the shores provide a tactile relationship made immense in their stream-crafted images.
‘Effigies juxtaposes the distinctive voices and visions of four emerging poets – dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt.
In drawing from their Native Alaskan and Native Hawaiian cultures and histories, the poems in this book are not an assemblage but a living force and create an intricate, haunting weave.’ —Arthur Sze
‘What a shape-shifting moment, this release of four lush and necessary voices into the open air. Linked by blood and fevered lyric, dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nalani McDougall and Mahealani Perez-Wendt offer up unapologetic and unflinching lessons that, as okpik says in the astonishing "Corpse Whale," shove "sinew back into the threaded bones of the land." Individually, each of these voices would be a revelation. Collectively, they're a revolution.’ —Patricia Smith
BOOKSELLER INFORMATION
ISBN9781844714070Extent160ppFormatPaperbackPublication Date15-Jun-09Publication StatusActiveSeriesEarthworksSubjectPoetry anthologies (various poets)
blood ruN
blood ruN
blood ruN
a verse play
Salt Publishing, UK, 2009
Good Earth State Park
resulted from this edition
PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK
Don D. Walker Award for Best Western Literature Criticism awarded to Chadwick Allen for "Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run" 2010
Allison Hedge Coke's remarkable sequence of two na
a verse play
Salt Publishing, UK, 2009
Good Earth State Park
resulted from this edition
PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK
Don D. Walker Award for Best Western Literature Criticism awarded to Chadwick Allen for "Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run" 2010
Allison Hedge Coke's remarkable sequence of two narrative and sixty-four persona poems, Blood Run, gives voice to the traditions of Indigenous North American mound-building cultures and, most strikingly, to Indigenous earthworks themselves. Central to this project is the poet's literary resurrection of a destroyed snake effigy mound once central to the Blood Run earthworks site, located on what is now the Iowa-South Dakota border, which she performs by citing the terrestrial form and celestial alignments of the majestic Serpent Mound extant in southern Ohio. Analysis of the thematic and structural complex Hedge Coke builds for her “Snake Mound” and “Stone Snake Effigy” persona poems reveals the multiple ways she simulates earthworks technologies, based in methods of Indigenous science, both in the strategic placement of individual poems within the sequence and in the complex geometry that underlies their free-verse forms. This subtle mathematical patterning, based on the natural numbers four, three, and seven and on the sequence of the first twenty-four primes, provides the foundation for a contemporary earthworks poetics. Hedge Coke explicates an older form of Indigenous writing, produced not simply on the land but throughthe medium of the land itself, while recording an activist witnessing of historical and ongoing attempts at its erasure.
‘I am a descendent of the mound-builders. I say, Praise to the book that praises this mystery and beauty and history. Allison Hedge Coke is a woman who has fallen deep into the earth world and reveals its hidden truths. She is a mesmerizing artist, with work based on research chanted into poetry.’ —Linda Hogan
‘These poems bear witness to a difficult age, an age built on a spiral of earthliness. They make an honoring song for the earth. This honoring song carries joy, sadness, fury and grief. We need this gift, these poems.’ —Joy Harjo, Mvksoke poet and musician
‘“Blood Run” the name of an ancient site in an eastern corner of the US state South Dakota. Hundreds of mounds were built here by Native American Plains peoples and cultures, a thousand years before the arrival of the white intruders (e.g., settlers, military). The poems revive the history of the sites at “Blood Run” giving profound voice to humans, animals, plants and structures, also with political-ecological hope for the future to preserve ancient spiritual places.’ —Bernhard Widder
‘Purity in Poetry! Allison Hedge Coke has captured the true essence of the way of life, celebration of life enjoyed by all the many nations of Indigenous people(s) living here on our Makoce (land) which all indigenous nations call in unison Mother Earth. All Our Relations (Mitakuye Oyasin) is eloquently spoken and expressed by Allison. It is a true honor to have a kola (friend) a true winyan (lady), to hold, keep and express the true spirit of all nations. I AM HONORED.’ —Irwin Sharp Fish, Sr.
SYNOPSIS
Blood Run was once a great mound city. About eighty remnants of its original four-hundred mounds still stand in testament to the 10,000 people who made their home here time ago and prove a terrific tribute of world history for their descendants living just down the road today. Yet, Blood Run is still in great danger of being forever destroyed by looters, developers, and the plow. This volume stands to persuade others to protect her and the sacred remains she guards in mounded tombs. The verse play of persona poems herein emanate its character of architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.
Previous to European colonization and conquest efforts, trade flourished between Indigenous peoples of the Americas for perhaps as long as time earmarked humankind. Evidence of continual vast trade throughout the Western Hemisphere, including art, symbolic items, and practical tools, was well cached in the multitude of mound cities puckering vast portions of the continent, some still incredibly existing after decades of continual and intentional desecration, disfigurement, and dismantling by grave robbers and Manifest Destiny driven anti-eco agriculturalists. Though surely there were times of dilemma for Indigenous Americans, these long-developed relations ensured survival during eras of doubt. Thus the likelihood of peace prevailed and most nations enjoyed the security of blanket protection, aid, and assistance from related tribes; whether by blood or adoption. In so much, tribes that enjoyed helping one another sustain themselves engaged in trade relationships with numerous additional nations outside these pacts; building cities of ceremonial, burial, effigy, and civic mounds, wherein which they flourished.
BOOKSELLER INFORMATION
ISBN9781844712663Extent120ppFormatPaperbackPublication Date15-Nov-06Publication StatusActiveSeriesEarthworksSubjectPoetry by individual poetsTrim Size216 x 140mm
ahani
blood ruN
Rock Ghost Willow Deer
Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry
To Topos International.
Hedge Coke, Allison Adelle (editor)
Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University, 2006, 2007.
Anthology 349 pp., 5.5 x 8.5 inches. Perfect-bound in printed card covers. Issued in lieu of the Fall 2006 & Winter 2007 issues of To Topos: Poetry International, published by the Department of Fore
Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry
To Topos International.
Hedge Coke, Allison Adelle (editor)
Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University, 2006, 2007.
Anthology 349 pp., 5.5 x 8.5 inches. Perfect-bound in printed card covers. Issued in lieu of the Fall 2006 & Winter 2007 issues of To Topos: Poetry International, published by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at OSU.
This (multilingual) volume is an attempt to bring together some of the diverseness and communalities from peoples who have been here since the earth, as we know it, was still forming and whose footprints mark the very rock in solidified molten imprint all over this greatly abundant rise of the planet. It is an attempt to bring together voices whose conversations once again are taking place in this day and time and who are coming together as sister nations despite the dissolution of trade ways which pre-existed colonization and joined peoples from a physically undivided continent pre-invasion and pre-Panama canal land division. Though contemporary referrals designate the place to be three separate entities (North, Central, and South America) the truth of the matter is this is one land base which gave birth to thousands and thousands of richly diverse cultures who shared in the abundance and gifts of the motherlands for eons before encroachment and who still live richly diverse lives oftentimes on, or very near significant places of origin and/or pre-colonial prophesy, and who deserve much more attention and place for world counsel than has been tolerated by any oppressively colonizing people or their descendants until this time whereas now there is no other answer. – Goodreads
An extraordinary multilingual anthology, with seventy-six poetry contributors, and twelve translators, bringing together a vast range of "hemispheric and oceanic indigenous" poets,, which (in the words of the editor) "serves as an inlet to vast multi-cultural / multi-dimensional diversity of peoples whose presence extinguishes the very intention of colonization to a great degree." Includes many bilingual or trilingual entries (with translations from Kamsa, Quechua, Mayan, Mapuche, Cherokee, and Spanish).
– Passages Bookstore
Long out of print, this book is available again through the surfacing of the last remaining copies from the publisher's back inventory. To Topos: Poetry International was founded by Roger Weaver, and edited (at the time of this anthology) by Joseph Ohmann-Krause and Eric Wayne Dickey; Allison Adelle Hedge Coke served as guest editor for this issue, credited the two magazine editors as associate-editors for giving her the opportunity to call for and curate the anthology, she edited.
Rock Ghost Willow Deer
Rock Ghost Willow Deer
Rock Ghost Willow Deer
Memoir
ebook 2021
2014 paperback release
Bison Books
2004 hardcover release, University of Nebraska Press
AIROS Book-of-the-Month
Booklist American Library Association Starred
Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer refers to life-revelations guiding the award-winning poet and writer through her many trials, as well as her labors in tobacco fields, factor
Memoir
ebook 2021
2014 paperback release
Bison Books
2004 hardcover release, University of Nebraska Press
AIROS Book-of-the-Month
Booklist American Library Association Starred
Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer refers to life-revelations guiding the award-winning poet and writer through her many trials, as well as her labors in tobacco fields, factories, construction, and fishing; her motherhood; her involvement with music and performance; and the melding of language and experience that brought order to her life. Hedge Coke shares insights gathered along the way, insights touching on broader issues such as modern life in the diaspora; lack of a national eco-ethos; the threat of alcohol, drug abuse, and violence; and the ongoing onslaught on self amid a complex, mixed heritage. Hedge Coke details her mother’s schizophrenia; the domestic and community abuse overshadowing her childhood; and torments both visited upon her—(rape and violence) and inflicted on herself (alcohol and drug abuse during her youth). Yet she managed to survive with her dreams and her will, her sense of wonder and promise undiminished.
“Telling is one thing. That’s what we do when we tell stories. But coming to know by experience and telling about it is another. Allison Hedge Coke in Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer shows us ‘knowing’ in her unique and wonderful way.”—Simon J. Ortiz, author of Out There Somewhere
“An extraordinary story of survival, compassion, courage, and a balanced comprehension of acceptance and the will to live.”—Maggie Necefer, Multicultural Review
“It is through her lush yet controlled use of language that Hedge Coke successfully creates a narrative of both personal and cultural history. . . . She is often unflinchingly succinct in her telling of some painful event, and other times, especially when describing moments when she is close to death, she offers us lyric gems. . . . She travels like a liminal being, moving fluidly across boundaries between prose and poetry, dream and reality, myth and history, animal and human, the personal and political.”—Mira Bartok, Fourth Genre
“Hedge Coke’s childhood and young adult years as recounted in this gritty and courageous memoir are not only a story of survival but a story of strength.”—Campbell Editorial.com
“[A] beautifully written, courageous memoir.”—Joyce Carol Oates
“Allison Hedge Coke’s intimate narrative details her journey through suffering to wholeness. Her story will inspire anyone who has faced adversity. . . .[Hedge Coke’s] insight is luminous.”—Great Plains Quarterly
"Harrowing" – Billings Gazzette
Author Bio
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Oklahoma, is a Great Plains Fellow at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She is the author of The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman(winner of the American Book Award), Off-Season City Pipe, and Blood Run, and she most recently edited Sing and Effigies.
206 pages
Illus.
Hardcover
May 2004
978-0-8032-1527-6
$34.95Add to CarteBook (EPUB)
(Requires Adobe Digital Editions)
August 2021
978-1-4962-0968-9
$16.95Add to CartPaperback
January 2014
978-0-8032-4846-5
$16.95Add to Cart
off-season City pipe
Rock Ghost Willow Deer
off-season City pipe
POETRY BY ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE
6 X 9 • 92 PAGES • 978-1-56689-171-4
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS, April 1, 2005
SHARE TWEET PIN
Booklist, Starred Review
WORKING-CLASS HERITAGE AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF URBAN POVERTY.
Drawing on her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker, and fisherwoman, Hedge Coke fills a void of working-class liter
POETRY BY ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE
6 X 9 • 92 PAGES • 978-1-56689-171-4
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS, April 1, 2005
SHARE TWEET PIN
Booklist, Starred Review
WORKING-CLASS HERITAGE AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF URBAN POVERTY.
Drawing on her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker, and fisherwoman, Hedge Coke fills a void of working-class literature with poems as vivid in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos. Off-Season City Pipe lyrically articulates the stark contrast between an ancestry whose strong work ethic, manual skills, and environmental stewardship defined their communities, but whose present circumstances have forced so many into impoverished city living, performing work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the winner of the 2005 Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year award for Poetry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the author of the American Book Award-winning debut collection Dog Road Woman and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow Deer (University of Nebraska Press). Growing up in North Carolina, Canada, and throughout the Great Plains, Hedge Coke earned her MFA at Vermont College and will join the faculty of Northern Michigan University in January 2005.
“[Hedge Coke] has paid her dues and earned this tough voice, the right to tell it like it is.” —North American Review
“From North Carolina tobacco fields to Midwest factories—in rusty, rural trailers and on urban streets—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke creates poems of aching muscle and ancient will.” —Pulse of the Twin Cities
“[Hedge Coke] does not wallow in sentimental attachments to the spaces of the past. Instead, she emphasizes the land as a place to work, stressing the stark realities of the rural and urban working class . . . Off-Season City Pipe demonstrates that, after long searching, Hedge Coke has found a place to work, envisioning the gritty, yet salvageable experiences of the working underclass.” —MultiCultural Review
“The grit of lived experience textures every page of this collection of poems. . . . [Hedge Coke] —a Beat poet, but also powerfully connected to the ‘relocated and dislocated peoples’ from whom she garners identity and sense of connectedness.” —Altar Magazine
“Hedge Coke gives us a glimpse of a rarified world, drawing from her background as a sharecropper, assembly-line packer and practitioner of other ‘manual arts.’ . . . Her pieces make music of factory rhythms, or paint portraits of dirt paths and empty shacks. With a cadence that occasionally rises and falls like a preacher’s, Hedge Coke lifts her readers’ thoughts.” —Minneapolis Observer
“[Hedge Coke’s] second book of poems, which spans life in San Francisco, Santa Fe and Sioux Falls, is as vast as it is urgently precise.” —Curve
“Long-lined, conversational poems full of southern swing and storytelling zest.” —Booklist
“These are hard-nosed narratives of simple people known along the way, Hedge Coke can’t disguise her simpatico though she bites with tough images and can pack a walloping metaphor onto her natural speech of muscled language which grazes smoothly across varied terrains.” —Maurice Kenny
dog road woman
Rock Ghost Willow Deer
off-season City pipe
American Book Award
Paterson Prize, first finalist
Diane Decorah Award, first finalist
POETRY BY ALLISON HEDGE COKE
APRIL 1, 1997 • 6 X 9 • 96 PAGES • 978-1-56689-061-8
DEBUT COLLECTION OF POEMS
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS, April 1, 1997
In her debut collection of poems, which received the American Book Award in 1998, Allison Adelle Hed
American Book Award
Paterson Prize, first finalist
Diane Decorah Award, first finalist
POETRY BY ALLISON HEDGE COKE
APRIL 1, 1997 • 6 X 9 • 96 PAGES • 978-1-56689-061-8
DEBUT COLLECTION OF POEMS
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS, April 1, 1997
In her debut collection of poems, which received the American Book Award in 1998, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke presents an autobiographical sketch of a contemporary life. These poems recount surviving diaspora, domestic violence, racism, and an extraordinary number of challenges. By drawing upon a variety of poetic and prosaic forms, Hedge Coke simulates and transforms the rhythms and sounds of her people. She weaves the shapes and patterns of her heritage into a magnificent tapestry of prayer, story, and song. Dog Road Woman is a sublime presentation of the strength, beauty, and spirit of the nations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke comes from fields factories, and waters. This is her debut full-length poetry book.
NOTE: "The Year of the Rat"
an epic poem/libretto was originally published as a stand alone chapbook in 1993 at Harry's House Printshop and is also included in this volume.
REVIEWS
“Hedge Coke’s dense narrative poems are crowded with memorable characters and situations. . . . She is a welcome new voice in American poetry.” —Jessica Hagedorn
“Allison Hedge Coke is a skilled, spirited, young poet who is transforming and honing her social and personal experience and reflection to speak with the voice of a whole people.” —Amiri Baraka
Album
Travels & Times
Travels & Times
Travels & Times
FilM SAMPLER
Red dust
“Making our Measure”
“Making our Measure”
Dust Bowl survivors and community members add critical dimensions of unparalleled resiliency sharing ways of coping in past climate change. Giving credence to elder wisdom, through their primary experiences we begin to grasp the value of knowing and letting go.
“Making our Measure”
“Making our Measure”
“Making our Measure”
making our measure
our motion in life
This film was written and directed by Pr. Hedge Coke, in April 2020 to serve as her (off-campus due to Covid) keynote address as the Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals. This film reminds us that the strength and wisdom to rise is within us and surrounds us, emanating from our lands and seas.
along the chaparral
She shakes chiles from her hair
She shakes chiles from her hair
Hedge Coke wrote and directed twenty-five moving personal tributes from survivors and three project making-of documentary film shorts while directing a contractual collaboration between UC Riverside, the Veterans Legacy Program of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration, in tribute to those interred at Ri
Hedge Coke wrote and directed twenty-five moving personal tributes from survivors and three project making-of documentary film shorts while directing a contractual collaboration between UC Riverside, the Veterans Legacy Program of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration, in tribute to those interred at Riverside National Cemetery. Along the Chaparral: memorializing the enshrined.
additionally collaborated with local and regional K-12 schools, and community in Riverside and Riverside County developing a GiS Web Story Application, anthologies, live performances all reliant upon program fellows teaching youth to research, write, publish and produce work.
For information on the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration Veterans Legacy Program https://www.cem.va.gov/legacy/
Also, please see Riverside National Cemetery’s home site: https://www.cem.va.gov/cems/nchp/riverside.asp
The project home site: https://alongthechaparral.ucr.edu and https://alongthechaparral.ucr.edu/films/ and the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs YouTube channel: https://www.va.gov; https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBvOzPLmbzjtpX-Htstp2vw
She shakes chiles from her hair
She shakes chiles from her hair
She shakes chiles from her hair
Check out this seductive 3D animated motion poem called "She Shakes Chiles From Her Hair"A poem created by the talented Allison Adelle Hedge Coke and adapted by Jeff Stevens for Motionpoems! For more information, please see the details and links below: Motionpoems is a nonprofit poetry film company that broadens the audience for poetry
Check out this seductive 3D animated motion poem called "She Shakes Chiles From Her Hair"A poem created by the talented Allison Adelle Hedge Coke and adapted by Jeff Stevens for Motionpoems! For more information, please see the details and links below: Motionpoems is a nonprofit poetry film company that broadens the audience for poetry by turning great contemporary poems into short films. External Links www.motionpoems.com . motionpoems.org A Film by: JEFF STEVENS A Poem by: ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE Executive Producers: TODD BOSS, EGG CREATIVE, and AMANDA MILLER Produced by: TAMMY KIMBLER Designers: JEFF STEVENS, DEB KIRKEEIDE, and JORDAN ANDERSON 3D, VFX & Animation Artists: ERIC SCHULIST, SCOTT KASSEKERT, MIKE NELSON, RILEY EASTMAN, and TOM DOEDEN Original Music & Sound: JESSE MARKS and ZAC BATES Voice Over Artist: LARA MILLIAN Editorial: PAUL CLARK Casting & Audio Recording: SOUND LOUNGE
Sampler of works collected
American Poets in the 21st Century The Poetics of Social Engagement
American Poets in the 21st Century The Poetics of Social Engagement
American Poets in the 21st Century The Poetics of Social Engagement
edited by claudia rankine and michael dowdy
The ideal introduction to the current generation of American poets
Understanding the current moment in poetry can be a difficult task, as the reader must sort among the avant-garde and mainstream, the traditional and the experimental. A welcome introduction to contemporary poetics, this collection
edited by claudia rankine and michael dowdy
The ideal introduction to the current generation of American poets
Understanding the current moment in poetry can be a difficult task, as the reader must sort among the avant-garde and mainstream, the traditional and the experimental. A welcome introduction to contemporary poetics, this collection represents one of the first attempts to chart the progress of a new generation of poets. Each chapter focuses on one poet, and includes a selection of poems, a brief statement of purpose by the poet, and a critical essay by a notable scholar. Working in forms ranging from the post-confessional lyric to documentary poetics, from the prose poem and the sonnet to sound poetry, these thirteen poets rank among the most notable and distinct of recent years. American Poets in the 21st Century will serve as a useful and enlightening guide for any reader interested in how new American poetry can look, feel, and sound. The enclosed CD includes each of the thirteen poets reading their work.
American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement is a critical anthology of contemporary poetry and poetics published in the Wesleyan University Press American Poets Series. The volume is coedited with Claudia Rankine and features fourteen poets alongside fourteen essays on their work by leading critics and poet-critics. More information, including the detailed table of contents, is available HERE.
Luke Jarzyna reviews Poetics of Social Engagement with keen insight and generosity at ASAP/J, the online journal of ASAP, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (June 2022).
Listen to my in-depth interview about the anthology, with Adam Cohen, on the Books Aren’t Dead podcast, a project of The Fembot Collective.
Here’s the dynamite lineup of poets: Rosa Alcalá, Brian Blanchfield, Daniel Borzutzky, Carmen Giménez Smith, Allison Hedge Coke, Cathy Park Hong, Christine Hume, Bhanu Kapil, Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, Fred Moten, Craig Santos Perez, Barbara Jane Reyes, Roberto Tejada, & Edwin Torres.
And the equally terrific lineup of critics (& poet-critics & poet-critic-translators, many of whom could also feature as poets) with essays on the poets: John Alba Cutler, Chris Nealon, Kristin Dykstra, Joyelle McSweeney, Chadwick Allen, Danielle Pafunda, Molly Bendall, Eunsong Kim, Michael Dowdy, Brent Hayes Edwards, J. Michael Martinez, Martin Joseph Ponce, David Colón, & Urayoán Noel.
“It’s not about what to do next so much as it’s about what we can imagine, and what our social positions and personalities….let us imagine, given the carnage outside. These poets help us think, not about vote tallies, not about one or another incident of injustice, but about the society we have, the way that identities form within and against it, the attitudes we can examine if we want to know how to stand up, or see more clearly, or fight back.”—Stephanie Burt
“Dowdy and Rankine have provided a poetics of recognition as well as of disobedience. Their excellent selection of poets and critical commentary offers a screen shot on an era of economic inequality and racial violence, but also of new alliances and resurgent activism. Poets in this important volume testify to the fact that poetry makes something happen by imagining a new plural subject—resistant and disobedient in equal parts.” —Michael Davidson
Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery
American Poets in the 21st Century The Poetics of Social Engagement
American Poets in the 21st Century The Poetics of Social Engagement
edited by lucille lang day
By bringing science into poetry, we open the possibility of discovering new forms and philosophies of poetry, new perspectives on our relationship to the Earth and our place in the universe, and even new scientific insights. In Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, five women poets—Elizabeth Bradfield
edited by lucille lang day
By bringing science into poetry, we open the possibility of discovering new forms and philosophies of poetry, new perspectives on our relationship to the Earth and our place in the universe, and even new scientific insights. In Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, five women poets—Elizabeth Bradfield, Lucille Lang Day, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ann Fisher-Wirth, and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke—discuss the many possibilities for discovery that arise from the union of poetry and science.
Praise for Poetry and Science
“It is a privilege to sing the praises of Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery. Five women poets discuss the thrilling connections between poetry and science in their poetry and lives and give the reader ample examples from their work and that of others. The curiosity of these poets is contagious, and reading the poems is a joy. As Lucille Lang Day says, poetry is ‘a medium for communicating the ideas of science and deepening our understanding of them.’ On our threatened, hurting planet, connecting with science and poetry has never been more essential.”
— Elizabeth J. Coleman, editor of HERE: Poems for the Planet
“This book of essays and poetry comes at a time when we most need more integration in our way of thinking about our connections to the natural world. Can we learn to see with the eye of a scientist and make cognitive leaps with the heart of a poet? These poets offer examples for how science has enriched their work and their capacity for wonder, and how poetry has deepened their relationships with the natural world. A must read for poets and scientists both.”
— Melissa Tuckey, editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology
“...where Poetry and Science particularly delights is in the personal nature of the pieces—how the poet-scientists and scientist-poets came to love science and poetry, how they are created by that broad mix and likewise help to further the discourse between and beyond the two. These are not, thankfully, just academic papers. They are, rather, personal essays supported by place- and science-rich poetry—they come from origin stories and conclude in what Alison Hawthorne Deming calls 'applied poetics.' They are captivating, masterful, essential.”
— Simmons Buntin, Editor-in-Chief of Terrain.org
Inflamed Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
American Poets in the 21st Century The Poetics of Social Engagement
Inflamed Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
Raj Patel, the New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with physician, activist, and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition Rupa Marya to reveal the links between health and structural injustices--and to offer a new deep medicine that can heal our bodies and our world.
The Covid pandemic
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
Raj Patel, the New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with physician, activist, and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition Rupa Marya to reveal the links between health and structural injustices--and to offer a new deep medicine that can heal our bodies and our world.
The Covid pandemic and the shocking racial disparities in its impact. The surge in inflammatory illnesses such as gastrointestinal disorders and asthma. Mass uprisings around the world in response to systemic racism and violence. Rising numbers of climate refugees. Our bodies, societies, and planet are inflamed.
Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body—our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, this groundbreaking work illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Inflammation is connected to the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the diversity of the microbes living inside us, which regulate everything from our brain’s development to our immune system’s functioning. It’s connected to the number of traumatic events we experienced as children and to the traumas endured by our ancestors. It’s connected not only to access to health care but to the very models of health that physicians practice.
Raj Patel, the renowned political economist and New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with the physician Rupa Marya to offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. Decolonizing heals what has been divided, reestablishing our relationships with the Earth and one another. Combining the latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with the stories of Marya’s work with patients in marginalized communities, activist passion, and the wisdom of Indigenous groups, Inflamed points the way toward a deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies, but the world.
Imprint Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Brief Bio
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's poetry books include The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman, Off-Season City Pipe, Blood Run, Burn, Streaming, Look at This Blue, as well as a memoir, Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer. She is the editor of the anthologies Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, Effigies, Effigies II, Effigies III, and others, and is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. Hedge Coke came of age working fields, factories, and waters and is currently at work on a film, Red Dust: resiliency in the dirty thirties, a new CD, and new poems.
Photo credit to Adrianne Mathiowetz
Full Bio
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke—Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside; 2022−2023 UCR Mellon Dean's Professor; Emory Elliott Book Award (2022-2023), National Book Award Finalist (2022), Legacy Artist Fellow/California Arts Council (2021−2022); George Garrett Awardee (2021, AWP); inducted Texas Institute of Letters (2021); the 2020 Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa; 2019 Fulbright Scholar; 2019 Red Cross Desert to the Sea Region Hero–Nominee; 2018 First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poet; 2018 TEDMED Scholar; 2017 Tulsa Artist Fellowship; and 2016 Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellow—is the author of numerous books which include: Look at This Blue (Coffee House Press, longlist, National Book Awards), Burn (MadHat Press), Streaming (Coffee House Press, Pen Southwest Book Award in Poetry, Wordcrafter of the Year Award, Lifetime Achievement Award NWCA, 2015 IPPY Medal); Off-Season City Pipe (labor volume, Wordcraft Writer of the Year in Poetry); and Dog Road Woman (Coffee House Press, American Book Award); Blood Run (free verse-play regarding the mound site in Iowa and South Dakota, Best Seller in US and UK), (Salt Publications 2006 UK, 2007 US, and Global); Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (memoir, University of Nebraska Press, hardcover, AIROS Book of the Month Selection; subsequent paperback, Bison Books); and a chapbook, The Year of the Rat, a dramatic long poem-libretto.
She has edited numerous anthologies, including: Effigies III, emerging queer female Pacific poets (2019); Effigies II (both from Salt Publications UK, NAC Book of the Month, 2014); Sing (University of Arizona, National Book Critics Circle Best Books of 2011); Effigies, Pacific Rim, poetry (Salt, NAC Book of the Month); Ahani (To Topos Edition, Oregon State University); They Wanted Children (poems and prose from Sudanese Lost Boys, Native American, Latino/a, Asian students coping in mainstream high school); and Coming to Life: Poems for Peace in the Aftermath of 9/11.
Hedge Coke has edited/guest edited several magazines and journals including World Literature Today, Green Mountains Review, Plume, and Platte Valley Review. Her play Icicles was a first finalist for the National Repertory Theater Prize. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been translated into multiple languages and have appeared in Poetry Out Loud, American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, World Literature Today, Orion, the New York Times, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Bettering American Poetry, Split This Rock Poem of the Week, Gargoyle, South Dakota Review, This Land, Denver Quarterly, Plume, Rattle, Waxwing, Brooklyn Rail, Bombay Gin, Academy of American Poets: Poem a Day, River Styx, Green Mountains Review, Akashic Noir, Poetry International, nd others. A contributing editor and editorial board member for NYU’s Black Renaissance Noire, Hedge Coke is on the advisory board of Penny Candy Books and the Board of Directors of Zoeglossia, a Community for Writers with Disabilities.
Hedge Coke’s work has been supported with fellowships and residencies by several entities, including: Playa at Summer Lake, National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Distinguished Professor, Hartwick College; UNL Center for Great Plains; MacDowell Colony; Weymouth Center; Hawthornden Castle; the Lannan Foundation; the Witter Bynner Foundation; the Library of Congress; University of Montenegro, Fulbright Scholar Program; Paul and Clarice A. Reynolds Chair in Creative Writing, University of Nebraska; Artist/Writer in Residence, University of Central Oklahoma; and Visiting Distinguished Writer, University of Hawai'i. She released an album with the funk guitarist Kelvyn Bell and multi-instrumentalist Laura Ortman.
Hedge Coke has worked in fields, factories, and waters and is currently at work with a feature-length labor and eco-ethos film, Red Dust: Resiliency in the Dirty Thirties.
Motionpoems and Pixel Farms made an animated short film from her poem, “She Shakes Chilis from her Hair.” She has completed writing/directing twenty-eight documentary shorts Along the Chaparral: memorializing the enshrined films (nineteen with cinematographer/photographer Shane Brown). Hedge Coke also wrote, performed in, and directed an Inouye Chair keynote film for the University of Hawai'i, Measuring Up (cinematographer Justyn Ah-Chong).
She has held several distinguished and endowed positions, and her teaching has garnished multiple excellence in teaching awards, including the King*Chavez*Parks Award.
Her most recent public facing projects include: directing UC Riverside's Writers Week Festival and Along the Chaparral: Memorializing the Enshrined, advising UC Riverside's Writers Resist and Poets Place/Writers Resist UCR Community Garden, and creating #poempromptsforthepandemic daily prompts on InstaGram and Facebook.
More information on Allison Hedge Coke and links to her books can be found at the links below:
- Look at This Blue 2022 Longlist, National Book Awards
- Effigies III Salt Publications UK/Penguin US 2019
- Burn, MadHat Press 2017
- Streaming, CHP 2014
- Coffee House Press, all books with CHP 1997, 2005, 2014, 2021
- Salt Publications, all books with Salt 2009, 2014, 2019
- University of Nebraska Press, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer 2014, 2004
- University of Arizona Press, Sing 2011
- Red Dust Film
- BRN
- World Literature Today, Autumn 2019, Recent Guest Editing
- Library of Congress
- Along the Chaparral, project
- Poetry Foundation
- The Academy of American Poets
- Puterbaugh Essay WLT
- Fulbright Scholars
- Black Earth Institute Emeritus Fellows
- Poetry Out Loud
- PBS
- NEA
- UHM
- UCR VA NCA Legacy Program Along the Chaparral
- UCR Writers Week
Original daily prompts to motivate and inspire #poempromptsforthepandemic daily on IG and FB
Honors
Fellowships/Residencies/Distinguished positions include
FLAD DISQUIET, Playa at Summer Lake, Great Plains Center, Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, MacDowell, Lannan, Kimmel Harding Nelson, National Science Foundation / H J Andrews Forest, ACTC Twin Cities, Carr, Soul Mountain, Salon Ada, Black Earth Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professorship, Paul & Clarice Reynolds Chair in Creative Writing, University of Central Oklahoma Artist in Residence, the University of Hawaii Distinguished Visiting Writer residency, Dan & Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals, and is dually appointed Distinguished Professor and Mellon Dean’s Professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Awards include
National Book Award Finalist (medal), Legacy Artist – California Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowships, Emory Elliott Book Award, George Garret Award – AWP, induction Texas Institute of Letters, Fulbright, First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award/Excellent Foreign Poet, US Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellow, Selected by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Lifetime Achievement Award NWCA, American Book Award, King*Chavez*Parks Award, Pen Southwest Poetry Award, IPPY Medal, Mayor's Award for Literary Excellence, New Mexico Press Woman's Award, Wordcrafter of the Year Award, multiple Mentor of the Year, Writer of the Year, Editor of the Year Awards, multiple AIROS Book of the Month picks, Teaching for Change Recommended Books, Split This Rock Recommended Books, Excellence in Teaching Awards, numerous grants and was selected for an inaugural Tulsa Fellowship for Writers.
Presentations include
The Library of Congress, Harlem Arts Salon, the Paul Hanley Furfey Lecture, Boston, The Dodge Festival, Split This Rock, DC, Princeton Festival, Poets House, NYC, Poetry Project, NYC, City Lights, San Francisco, Naropa Summer Institute, The Loft, Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Fall for the Book Festival–Virginia, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, IMRAM Literary Festival Dublin–Ireland, International Poetry Festival–Toronto, 3rd World Poetry Festival of Venezuela, Caracas, Maturin, and Tucupita-Venezuela, XV & XVII Prometeo International Poetry Festival Medellin–Colombia, XV International Festival of Poetry Rosario–Argentina, Poetry Festival, Amman-Jordan, Lisbon-Portugal, the University of Montenegro and American Embassy in Cetinje & Podgoricia, Montenegro, Weihai, Shanghai, Beijing, Jinhua,Lingshui Village, Mentougou, Sihui, China, and Catholica University in Lisbon.
