Look at This Blue

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. 

Publication date: March 29, 2022

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 168 pages

ISBN: 9781566896207

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.

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 Australian Book Review Best Book of the Year 2022

“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.”

—Judges’ Citation, 2022 National Book Awards

“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