Book Review: "Look at This Blue" by Allison Adelle Hedge Cooke

By Alex Carrigan

​Note: The formatting of Hedge Coke's poetry could not be ideally preserved in this review's quotes. 

In her latest book Look at this Blue, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke attempts to use a long poem to highlight and call attention to the destruction of the environment and people of California over the centuries and into the future. The American Book Award winner and Fulbright Scholar's work is one long poem divided into numerous breaks that trace all the ways the environment and the living beings within it are challenged and threatened, whether it be due to climate change, hunting, genocide, and more. What could easily be a preachy, overstuffed author tract instead becomes a poetic exercise in how we easily create and destroy.

The book begins with a short verse describing the Xerces blue butterfly, the first of many blue creatures Hedge Coke describes in the book. She writes, "from the sand dunes of San Francisco / first-known American butterfly to become extinct due to humans / first known". Following that, Hedge Coke's verse place the reader into the setting of California, describing many of its natural habitats and the way the beings within them are threatened by man or by natural disasters. This includes verses like the following:

"Sleep in the dream of bettering world.
Sleep in the dream/nightmare woken.

What we carry howls     boggling
her cheek contorts in flame unfanned       yet fanning.

She eclipses all asunder, all broken.
Scar face vision in temporal melt."

Around page 33 of the book, Hedge Coke does probably the most audacious action she could take with this collection. For the next several pages, she proceeds to write the names of every animal in California that is currently endangered or has gone extinct, then follows it with every plant that is currently endangered or going extinct. While in some cases she does write some poetic lines, such as "Frog, Sierra Nevada yellow-legged / shorter legged, eats dead / generations go at once if water dries / fewer frogs found, fewer grow legs, loose tails / thrive," the section becomes merely a repetition of all the endangered living things, and with the author's use of formatting forcing the reader to take it all in.

Below is a screenshot this reviewer took of one page, to illustrate this formatting:

Pages like this continue throughout the collection. It feels as though Hedge Coke is letting the artistic nature of these creatures be enough to carry the poetic verses. These were all beings granted names by humans, with care and thought put into their names, and now they are easily being destroyed and wiped off the face of the earth. Long sections like this force the reader to acknowledge and take in the melody of names like "Kangaroo rat, San Bernadino Merriam's" or "Skipper, Laguna Mountains," and because this catalog created a natural repetition that turns poetic once all the names allow for natural rhyming and assonance to emerge.

After this, Hedge Coke's collection proceeds to document ways in which the destruction of environments in California also affect the humans living there. These sections are mainly dedicated to crimes committed against indigenous populations and immigrant communities in California, including a list of massacres and stanzas about historical and current immigrant policy, especially during the Trump administration and the COVID-19 era. She writes,

"Shot and killed standing on the bank throwing rocks
Foot chased into the lake, they drowned there
Shot multiple times in the back for throwing rocks
for insubordination
He was taken to a holding cell following arrest
in six hours he was dead."

The section ends with a mix of stanzas and verses regarding the environment and its people mixed together. Many of the words uses throughout are those the reader has become familiar with due to Hedge Coke's cataloguing, and it makes the reader see how connected they all are. One of the last few verses is the following:

"California spread below us
manzanitas gleaming in sun
stars ahead in darkness await our time there.
For now, it is the offering we make."

Look at This Blue is an attempt to catalogue and record that which we are about to lose. Hedge Coke's collection makes the reader aware of everything endangered, and does so in a way that preserves the beauty and uniqueness of creatures, plants, and people who are endangered. What is written in Look at This Blue isn't only occurring in California, but merely represents one area in which we are allowing our world to be threatened and destroyed because we forgot to appreciate the natural wonder of life. The collection will stay in your mind long after you read it, and you will remember it once you hear a birdsong you're unfamiliar with or see a plant whose name you don't know, and you'll wonder just what would happen if no one could ever identify them.