Poetry by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

December 2, 2014 • 6 x 9 • 168 Pages • 978-1-56689-375-6

An award-winning poet considers loss, memory, and the fate of the planet.

“Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s fierce new poetry collection, Streaming, takes her always brave and startling sonics into new narrative spaces. These poems are full of needful improvisation and piano runs. Hedge Coke makes music from tornados and glyphs, from cranes spiraling overhead, and from the grumbling stomachs of hungry children. She sings these stories because she has to and because we need her to. And when the speaker in ‘Sudden Where’ says ‘maybe we’d find something magnificent, give it up to make somebody happy,’ it is clear that in these urgent poems, and in this necessary book, we’ve found both the magnificent and the unforgettable.” —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

About the Author

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s books include Streaming, Burn, Blood Run, Off-Season City Pipe, Dog Road Woman, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Effigies, Effigies II, and Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. Awards include an American Book Award, a King-Chavez-Parks Award, 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award NWCA, 2016 Pen Southwest Award in Poetry, the 2016 Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship, and 2017 Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is a contributing editor for Black Renaissance Noire and Kore Press, directs the annual Literary Sandhill CraneFest & Retreat and is a Zoeglossia board member. A founding faculty of the VCFA MFA in Writing & Publishing program, Hedge Coke is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside. She came from working fields, factories, and waters and is currently at work directing a climate change documentary.

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please call (612) 338-0125 or email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Praise for Streaming

Winner of the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship, awarded by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, 2016

Winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award, NWCA, 2015

Winner of the Wordcrafter of the Year Award, Wordcraft Circle, 2015

Winner of the PEN Southwest Award for Poetry, 2015

Bronze Medalist Independent Publisher Book Awards for Poetry, 2015  

Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award, 2015  

Finalist: 2015 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal for most thought-provoking book. 

Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award 

Featured Selection in AIROS National Poetry Month Feature, 2015

Split This Rock recommended poetry books of 2014 

Teaching for Change Best Books Recommended, 2014

“By uniting the poems through imagery, language, and movement, Allison Adele Hedge Coke creates more than a collection of poems. Streaming is a continuous trail of light, a steady flow music from the heart of the motherland.” —Green Mountains Review

“The poems come toward us from a museum of abundance; but museums are filled with relics and this poetry is purely fluid. Everything is moving, changing, and growing, disintegrating and rejuvenating for its own purposes.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

“Hedge Coke does not just endeavor to show the world as it is; she encourages readers of diverse backgrounds, to resist its inherent prejudices, and to effect positive change within it. . . . A poet with feet in the river, even as her head rests on a mountain top.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Erudite and complex. . . . Reading it, you can feel the rhythmic propulsion of each image as surely as you can feel your own pulse.” —The Rumpus

“[Streaming] reveals to us a mature poet of imagery whose sonics have shifted toward a be-bop poetics, in which rich, complex sound-patterns are essential to the collection’s meaning-making and emotional impact.” —World Literature Today

“The language and the imagery in the poems are as ubiquitous as the giant aspen. This is an old voice rooted beneath a brutal American landscape, full of drought, burning, violence, migrant workers, diaspora.” —GMR Online

“In her collection of poetry, Streaming, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke brings nature and our sensory experiences together in order to create a rich collection that speaks to our experiences with the world.” —Dr. TJ Eckleberg Review

“Song is an essential part of [Hedge Coke’s] collection.” —Kansas City Star

“Streaming, is an elegant collaboration between poetry and music.” —Hawaii Review

“Each poem has its own rhythm that meshes into that of the collection overall, a body greater than the sum of its parts, an organism alive with language.” —AskMen

“Her poems beg to be read aloud, a jumble of hard sounds that wind their way into an effortless melody. . . . Streaming is truly an accomplishment.” —Summerset Review

“We should be grateful to Allison Hedge Coke for compiling, with her poetry, notes about a world that will be unfamiliar to a generation living one hundred years from now. By that time, the nature that she describes will have all but vanished. It’s as though the earth itself was dictating its biography to her.” —Ishmael Reed

“If the history of the Americas is a body of stories, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s Streaming is most definitely its life-blood. This glorious book journeys through the bittersweet relationships between personhood and nation, nationhood and nature, and nature and culture, bearing witness to each entity’s determined struggle, each entity’s hard-won triumph: ‘colonization,/ construction, that morning, this day,/ every beam in balance despite horror /in the world.’ Streaming’s elegant verse will ‘sing you home into yourself and back to reason.’” —Rigoberto González

“Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s new collection Streaming is a veritable symphony, her poems embracing musicality and dissonance like the best of modern composers.” —Largehearted Boy

“A rich collection that speaks to our experiences with the world. . . . [A collection] so beautiful that many times it feels as if the poems are singing.” —Dr. TJ Eckleburg Review

“A brilliant and brave new collection of poems that irrevocably alters our conventional notion of what constitutes narrative space.” —The Journal (West Virginia)

“Streaming must possess you. It is not enough to own the volume. It is not enough to read it. For this book is really a chronicle, a memorial, a eulogy for the Earth as we know her before she collapsed in front of our astonished eyes.” —Red Paint Hill

“Hedge Coke is a poet with a remarkable voice.” —The Volta

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Dog Road Woman

Off-Season City Pipe

Streaming

Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the Detours

Working Words

Look at This Blue