Poetry by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

April 1, 2005 • 6 x 9 • 92 pages • 978-1-56689-171-4

An American Book Award-winning poet explores her working-class heritage against the backdrop of urban poverty.

Drawing on her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker, and fisherwoman, Hedge Coke's poems are as vivid in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos. Off-Season City Pipe lyrically articulates the stark contrast between an ancestry whose strong work ethic, manual skills, and environmental stewardship defined their communities, but whose present circumstances have forced so many into impoverished city living, performing work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the winner of the 2005 Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year award for Poetry.

About the Author

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the author of the American Book Award-winning debut collection Dog Road Woman and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow Deer (University of Nebraska Press). Growing up in North Carolina, Canada, and throughout the Great Plains, Hedge Coke earned her MFA at Vermont College and will join the faculty of Northern Michigan University in January 2005.

Praise for Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Winner of the Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Award, 2005

Praise for Off-Season City Pipe

“[Hedge Coke] has paid her dues and earned this tough voice, the right to tell it like it is.” —North American Review

“From North Carolina tobacco fields to Midwest factories—in rusty, rural trailers and on urban streets—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke creates poems of aching muscle and ancient will.” —Pulse of the Twin Cities

“[Hedge Coke] does not wallow in sentimental attachments to the spaces of the past. Instead, she emphasizes the land as a place to work, stressing the stark realities of the rural and urban working class . . . Off-Season City Pipe demonstrates that, after long searching, Hedge Coke has found a place to work, envisioning the gritty, yet salvageable experiences of the working underclass.” —MultiCultural Review

“The grit of lived experience textures every page of this collection of poems. . . . [Hedge Coke] is a Beat poet, but also powerfully connected to the ‘relocated and dislocated peoples’ from whom she garners identity and sense of connectedness.” —Altar Magazine

“Hedge Coke gives us a glimpse of a rarified world, drawing from her background as a sharecropper, assembly-line packer and practitioner of other ‘manual arts.’ . . . Her pieces make music of factory rhythms, or paint portraits of dirt paths and empty shacks. With a cadence that occasionally rises and falls like a preacher’s, Hedge Coke lifts her readers’ thoughts.” —Minneapolis Observer

“[Hedge Coke’s] second book of poems, which spans life in San Francisco, Santa Fe and Sioux Falls, is as vast as it is urgently precise.” —Curve

“Long-lined, conversational poems full of southern swing and storytelling zest.” —Booklist

“This fine collection of poetry by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke makes a ladder of songs. The ladder balances between the well-grooved symbol of a warrior on horseback running into the wind for battle, to a Native mother feeding her children when there is nothing. She, too, is a warrior. What is presented in this evocative poetry is not a ‘struggle for dignity,’ but a dignity for struggle.” —Joy Harjo

“These are hard-nosed narratives of simple people known along the way, Hedge Coke can’t disguise her simpatico though she bites with tough images and can pack a walloping metaphor onto her natural speech of muscled language which grazes smoothly across varied terrains.” —Maurice Kenny