Look at This Blue

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781566896290
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía americana

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.

Look at This Blue

Xerces blue butterfly from the sand dunes of San Francisco

first-known American butterfly to become extinct due to humans

first known

Redwood burls cut like blisters shaved from trunks

poach life source from root

killing giants in knobby growth removals

baseline / canopy-height bud tissue

unsprouted genetic code for clone of parent-tree emergence—

Barrel at my mouth, ready-cocked held there

by my baby brother’s bared grip.

Lemon-wedge half-moon pops over

flat Cosumnes shallows

over sweet sound, low rustle in Lodi water

chortle trill night language from standing

cranes, sandhills, they’ve been there

all along, standing still knee-deep in station pools.

Orion hovering eastward drawn, readied.

Someone slinks past doorjamb

each choke hold felled vaporizes cognizance.

In a world fast shaking herself loose

from diabolical torrent.

Rising throttle song above throttled breath

choked out between calligraphies,

madness clenched fury unfurled release

misery met in each pummeled break

it’s not over.

Sleep in despair sleeping moth-tongue, unrolled against central incisors,

human-throated, deep yearns for saxophone

trachea windpipe—

Sandhills chortle only saving grace wetlands marshalled.

Nothing here on guardian watch.

Riverside.

Reaching back for slipped skateboard

he was hit so hard he flew while breaking.

A crow above, whose wings were sunning, swooped

at the same time the car careened to halt

on Martin Luther King Road

near Bordwell Park, Eastside, where the speed limit suddenly increases

while approaching two close crosswalks leading to homes from Stratton

Community Center, Bordwell, Emerson Elementary—Eastside; Black,

brown kids; elders—

Anyone can see someone once worked this out.

Ishi died thirteen years before I was born,

so I have no nice anecdotes about knowing

him when I was a child. I’m sorry.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

It was custom to be introduced by name, not to utter own. UC Berkeley chose

man/Ishi for a name for him, which he (accepted).

He worked as a research assistant in the anthropology department.

He was placed into a museum in the anthropology department.

Yana continued living in California.

After declaration that Ishi

was the last of his people, at least

four other Yahi were seen in the

bush.

Yana [was] an agglutinative, polysynthetic

language with SVO word order. The Yana

language was distinctive in having different

word forms used by male and female speakers,

an unusual trait that does not exist in the other

languages of this region.

1999, Ishi’s brain returned to Yana people, his closest relatives

“It’s all going to burn,” says man accused of setting Holy Fire

First the puma in Santa Paul...