Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an acclaimed author whose works delve deeply into themes of Indigenous experience and resilience. Her writing, spanning poetry, prose, and drama, is characterized by a powerful voice and raw honesty, often drawing from personal history and cultural heritage. Through her literary contributions and activism, she champions the preservation of Indigenous traditions and the protection of sacred sites. Hedge Coke's unique style and profound engagement with her subject matter offer readers a compelling perspective on enduring strength and cultural vitality.
This volume testifies to the need to protect the remarkable ruins of the Indigenous North American city of Blood Run and the sacred remains she guards there in mounded tombs. The persona poems herein emanate its character embraced in architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.
Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Poetry Winner of the 2022 Emory Elliott Book Award Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award Finalist for the 2023 ASLE Creative Book Award 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.