Poetry Book Club: Look at this Blue

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Poetry!

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.

“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