Look at This Blue

Look at This Blue is an impressive lyrical accounting of California’s biodiversity that also serves as a preemptive elegy for these plants, animals, and human beings, given the current climate crisis. In one poem, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke catalogs species in an abecedarian zig-zag:

     Rail, California clapper
  Rail, light-footed clapper
Rail, Yuma clapper
   Salamander, California tiger, Santa Barbara
     Salamander, California tiger, Sonoma
        Salamander, desert slender
          Salamander, Santa Cruz long-toed
             Salmon, coho

This sort of listing commands a great deal of the book’s page count, which might easily alienate readers hungry for evocative imagery and lyricism. For Hedge Coke, that’s precisely the point: “You think it’s exhaustive now; this is partial recount.” The sense of overwhelm is further amplified when Hedge Coke seamlessly transitions into identifying hundreds of indigenous villages whose inhabitants were massacred by Spanish colonizers, under the pretext of “missionizing.”

And yet, as Hedge Coke points out, California is still home to more indigenous people than any other state, which adds to the sense of urgency in these poems, and for Hedge Coke, who is of mixed First Nations and European descent, the stakes are also deeply personal:

My gut aches. All this, all this indelible hurt.

A scrub jay calls for peanuts, whole, raw, shell intact.
Each year a pair leaves one, takes one with. Our bird stays,
plays with squirrels, takes nuts from us, coexists.

Trusts.

Where is the love for young ones taken, without reason, hope?

These quiet moments of contemplation stand in stark contrast to historical facts and staggering statistics, and the result is a hypnotic assembly of discordant parts. As it bears witness to the wonders of one continental coast, Look at This Blue asks us all to face our world together.