Look at This Blue - by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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, amon

About the Author

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 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.

Hedge Coke is the editor of ten anthologies and has served as an editor and guest editor for several magazines and journals, most recently World Literature Today. The social media hashtag #poempromptsforthepandemic hosts hundreds of original prompts she crafted as public outreach during the COVID-19 pandemic. A career community advocate and organizer, she most recently directed UCR's Writers Week, the Along the Chaparral/Pūowaina project, and the Sandhill Crane Migration Retreat and Festival.