A friend of this blog, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, is on the long list for the National Book Award in Poetry! Congratulations to Allison and all the other longlisters!
Coffee House Press’s promotion of Allison’s searing and poignant collection, Look at This Blue, includes the following: “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. “
Emily Vizio in World Literature Today says, “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.”
We love Look at This Blue, an urgent look at the effects of climate crisis in America, and California, in particular. If you read Allison’s incredible Blood Run, about the fight to preserve ancient burial mounds along the upper Mississippi River, you know she has been building to this additional national recognition. A stalwart of Native American literature and an incredibly good human being, Allison has offered encouragement to me and many other authors for many years through her teaching, her anthologies, and her many kindnesses. Please join me in wishing her well.
A review of Look at this Blue is coming to this blog, but why not join me in reading it and let me know what you think?
Here’s the Publishers Weekly article on the rest of the long list:
Weaver's Knot by Glenda Bailey-Mershon 