Off-Season City Pipe

Off-Season City Pipe

From BooklistHedge Coke's reputation rests on her memoirs concerned with her Native American heritage, such as the searing and memorable Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer [BKL Ap 15 04]. Here she reveals another identity, as a poet of the American worker--"cracker-packin' girls" and "fieldworkers and framers like me"--in long-lined, conversational poems full of southern swing and storytelling zest. She captures the lives of people struggling, sometimes failing like the zoned-out man in the Mission District who needs a "Houdini mentality to stand," but also exulting in their strength, like the women who, "double-handed / popping apart plump green strings / fresh from leafy hills," can pint after pint of produce. Though informed by the history of Indian struggle, the poems are set more in the city than on the reservation, in places "the BIA forgot to watch." Anyone interested in the often silenced voices of America's working poor will appreciate these poems. Patricia MonaghanCopyright ? American Library Association. All rights reservedIn poems as beautiful in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos, poet and memoirist Hedge Coke draws upon her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker and fisherwoman, articulating the stark contrast between a tradition of labor that instills pride and builds strong communities with the modern-day reality of backbreaking work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people.Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, of Huron, Tsa la gi, French Canadian and European descent, is the author of the American Book Award-winning debut collection Dog Road Woman and the memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow Deer. She has been instrumental in creating Native American mentorship programs throughout the country and will join the faculty of Northern Michigan University in 2005.ReviewHedge Coke unites American working-class experience with her Cherokee heritage in a sinewy lyricism where exhaustion co-exists with the exultant. -- The Pulse of the Twin Cities, May 12, 2005About the AuthorAllison 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.