Hedge Coke, Allison Adelle

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, a Fulbright scholar, First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award recipient 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. The book-length poem Look at This Blue (Coffee House Press) examines America’s genocidal past and present to warn of a future threatened by mass extinction and climate peril. An assemblage of historical records and lyric fragments, these poems form a categorization 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 cataloging of loss crescendos into resistance.