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

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

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Prize
Winner of the 2022 Emory Elliott Book Award
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award
Finalist for the 2023 ASLE Creative Book Award

"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

"I wouldn't be the first to hear the voluminous and ecstatic witness of Whitman in Hedge Coke's work. . . . Music is one of Hedge Coke's great gifts. Smart, subtle, texturous." --Emily Vizzo, World Literature Today

"​​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

"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. 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

"A necessary reckoning with the ongoing, disastrous, criminal genocide perpetuated in the Golden State, amongst the beauty and riches of its landscape." --Eleni Sikelianos

"Allison Adelle Hedge Coke sings California with a garden of images, all life, named and splendidly watered by bewitching words--but this is no romantic paean. She documents genocide, massacres, slavery, arsons, lies, the laments of the pushed out and knocked down. Here's the hardest truth, wrapped in lyric." --Luis J. Rodríguez

"This is a poem whose borders extend beyond geography and territory and history. This is a poem to be lived." --Dean Rader

"Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is one of the most important and innovative environmental writers of our time." --Craig Santos Perez

"This is a book for the world we currently inhabit, the long unstoppable chaos, the season of losing everything we love. Listen. Let yourself belong." --Molly Fisk

"Hedge Coke's reckoning with the genocide of the Indigenous and the mass extinction of endemic species bares the roots of conflagration throughout 'Indian Country, California, every bit.' Look at This Blue is itself a blue flame that comes to us in time." --Sesshu Foster

"Look at This Blue is a fiercely pulsating journey of love and despair. The earth crackles, the body heaves in these wrenching snapshots of personal, historical, and environmental disasters. You want to look away, but you can't, as Allison Hedge Coke chronicles all the ways we are broken, our bone-deep griefs. A list of resources at the end urges us toward the work of survival. We are still on the hook." --Diana García

"Both astonishing and piercing, hopeful and solemn, Look at This Blue plunges the reader into the fractal distortion of seeing the sun from underneath the water. This is a poem of urgency, of sorrow and memory, a call for us to see anew and change the destructive path we're on before we are all consumed by it." --Matthew Shenoda

Praise for Look at This Blue

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Prize
Winner of the 2022 Emory Elliott Book Award
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award
Finalist for the 2023 ASLE Creative Book Award

"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 Báaacute;ez, Poetry Foundation

"I wouldn't be the first to hear the voluminous and ecstatic witness of Whitman in Hedge Coke's work. . . . Music is one of Hedge Coke's great gifts. Smart, subtle, texturous." --Emily Vizzo, World Literature Today

"​​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

"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. 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

"A necessary reckoning with the ongoing, disastrous, criminal genocide perpetuated in the Golden State, amongst the beauty and riches of its landscape." --Eleni Sikelianos

"Allison Adelle Hedge Coke sings California with a garden of images, all life, named and splendidly watered by bewitching words--but this is no romantic paean. She documents genocide, massacres, slavery, arsons, lies, the laments of the pushed out and knocked down. Here's the hardest truth, wrapped in lyric." --Luis J. Rodríiacute;guez

"This is a poem whose borders extend beyond geography and territory and history. This is a poem to be lived." --Dean Rader

"Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is one of the most important and innovative environmental writers of our time." --Craig Santos Perez

"This is a book for the world we currently inhabit, the long unstoppable chaos, the season of losing everything we love. Listen. Let yourself belong." --Molly Fisk

"Hedge Coke's reckoning with the genocide of the Indigenous and the mass extinction of endemic species bares the roots of conflagration throughout 'Indian Country, California, every bit.' Look at This Blue is itself a blue flame that comes to us in time." --Sesshu Foster

"Look at This Blue is a fiercely pulsating journey of love and despair. The earth crackles, the body heaves in these wrenching snapshots of personal, historical, and environmental disasters. You want

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.