Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, a Fulbright scholar, First Jade Nurtured SiHui Female International Poetry Award recipient, recent Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals, and Library of Congress Witter Bynner fellow, has written seven books of poetry, one book of nonfiction, and a play. More about this author >
From the publisher:
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.
Hedge Coke examines the blue of extinction, the blue of the last butterflies, the blue of arson, howls of species gone, the last note of Ishi and his people. The speaker’s blue spirals of compassion and action, flora and fauna endangered, the blue of facts, lists, documents, missionization of First Peoples propel us through the poem, commit us to zig-zagging across stanzas of lives lost. A contesting poetics of many voices, Look at This Blue is a timely and necessary book.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke at the 2022 National Book Awards Finalist Reading
