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