Look at This Blue

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 Praise for Streaming “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 a continuous trail of light, a steady flow music from the heart of the motherland.” —Green Mountains Review Praise for Off-Season City Pipe “Long-lined, conversational poems full of southern swing and storytelling zest.” —Booklist “This fine collection of poetry by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke makes a ladder of songs. . . . What is presented in this evocative poetry is not a ‘struggle for dignity,’ but a dignity for struggle.” —Joy Harjo Praise for Dog Road Woman Winner of the 1997 American Book Award “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 “These are the songs of righteous anger and utter beauty.” —Joy Harjo “These poems have so much to say that they can’t talk fast enough, and this poet is not afraid to speak the dangerous truth.” —Linda Hogan