The Winner of the 2005 Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Award
“[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.”
—MultiCultural Review
“The grit of lived experience textures every page of this collection of poems.”
—Altar Magazine
“[Hedge Coke's] pieces make music of factory rhythms, or paint portraits of dirt paths and empty shacks.”
—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
“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
