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Burn
poetry
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
Streaming
poetry
Cover photo by Melissa Groo
loss, memory, and the fate of the planet –
"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
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
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.
“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
Effigies 3
The Effigies series has woven a vibrant tapestry of indigenous poets from Native North America and the Pacific. As the third in this series, 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.
Effigies 2
compilation of five debut books by Laura Da', Ungelbah Davila, Kristi Leora,
Lara Mann, Kateri Menominee as edited by Allison Hedge Coke
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.
Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer
2014 paperback release, memoir
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 Native 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.
[A] beautifully written, courageous memoir.”—Joyce Carol Oates
One minute she is in hiding in the woods from her violent husband, the next she is seven months pregnant looking down the barrel of her brother's shotgun. But for every moment of struggle, she somehow finds deliverance in music, the earth, stars, stories, her heritage, and her imagination—all the things that sustain broken children in a world devoid of human trust. – Mira Bartok
Sing
Poetry from the Indigenous Americas
National Book Critics Circle Best Books
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.”
"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." —The Bloomsbury Review
“Hedge Coke worked to illuminate the important work of poets of diverse backgrounds and heritage.”—Poetry from the Plains
Cinema
Photo by Shane Brown
Director of Photography, Red Dust
Red Dust: Native Resiliency in the Dirty Thirties
Thanks to Dorothy Lange, the iconic face of the Dust Bowl has always been unnamed Indigenous workers on the move. This film establishes voice and firsthand personal experience through the living histories of its survivors bringing their ability to endure to climate and socio-economical and cultural change just in the time to offer resiliency to the new shifts. The subjects represent several cultures and ways of coping through the dire days.
http://www.hatchfund.org/project/red_dust_a_mixed_blood_dust_bowl_childhood
http://www.reddustfilm.com
Coming soon.
Motion Poems / Pixel Farms Animation
Recordings
Praise
"This collection is an entrance into that part of "America" without which there is 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
“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, here marginalized because of their native culture but also because of the daring announcement of their individuality”
—Billy Collins
Honors
Fellowships/Residencies/Distinguished positions – 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, appointed Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Awards – US Library of Congress 2016 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, 2017, First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award/Excellent Foreign Poet 2018.
Presentations
The Library of Congress, Harlem Arts Salon, the Paul Hanley Furfey Lecture, Boston, Split This Rock, DC, Native Innovation, Poets House, NYC, Poetry Project, NYC, City Lights, San Francisco, Naropa Summer Institute, The Loft, 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.
Bio
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's books include The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman, Off-Season City Pipe, Blood Run, Burn and Streaming as well as a memoir, Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer. She is the editor of the anthologies Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, Effigies and Effigies II 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.
Contact
Booking
http://www.speakersforanewamerica.com/
Coffee House Press<lizzie@coffeehousepress.org>
Jennifer Hamilton-Emery<jen@saltpublishing.com>
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