Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
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COURTESY OF ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE
ON THE WINGS OF A CAROLINA PARAKEET a review by Gina Caison Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Streaming. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2014.
Originally from Mebane, NC, GINA CAISON is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta where she teaches courses in Southern and Native American literatures. Currently, she is at work on a monograph titled Red States: Literature, Native America, and the U.S. South, which explores the recurrent use of Native history in literature of the US South. Her recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from journals such as The Global South, Mississippi Quarterly, and PMLA. Read her interview with Eddie Swimmer about Unto These Hills in NCLR 2010. ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE spent part of her childhood in North Carolina. She has an MFA from Vermont College. Her poetry collection Dog Road Woman (Coffee House Press, 1997) received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus foundation. She has also twice received the Writer of the Year award for Poetry from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Streaming is her fourth poetry collection. Read more about Allison Adelle Hedge Coke in Scott Hicks’s essay in NCLR 2011, and read samples of her poetry in NCLR 2004 and 2011. ABOVE Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Wordfest in Asheville, NC, 28 Apr. 2013
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has returned with a collection of poetry that rivals her previously successful and critically acclaimed work, from Dog Road Woman (1997) to Blood Run (2007). Furthermore, fans of her autobiographical memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (2004), will appreciate her continued focus on place and the connections that she makes between locations that draw humans into a wider cosmology. Likewise, Hedge Coke continues to push poetic form to its limits, engaging time signatures that disrupt received temporalities of structured verse. As many readers of Hedge Coke can attest, she leaves us wanting more, and Streaming does not disappoint. It’s a thick collection, simultaneously expansive and focused, gentle in its care for the planet and pointed in its critique of human destruction. As in much of Hedge Coke’s work, North Carolina serves as a setting for many of the poems. And yet, the collection does even more in poems such as “Niño de la Calle,” where it establishes a great chain of humanity from the streets of Cary and Raleigh to the thoroughfares of Medellin, Columbia, where the author
recalls her own battles with drug abuse alongside her brother’s struggle for internal peace. Hedge Coke sees the young boys on the street “gone to glue, abandoned here,” and she recognizes herself and her family in the boys’ eyes. She reminds the reader of a difficult truth, closing the poem with a haunting call to action: “Each boy our son.” Streaming alights on the wings of one of its most frequently recurring symbols in the Carolina parakeet, carrying us across time and space and, most importantly, the imagined colonial borders that separate us from one another. In this way, Hedge Coke’s collection unites North Carolina with a planetary consciousness that streams across the Dog Road Milky Way. The collection reaches back and pushes forward, setting its clock to an indigenous temporality of the continent. In this time-scape, the poems follow the paths of Native American knowledges. In the section “Where We Have Been,” which is dedicated to her father, Hedge Coke works through Dust Bowl imagery, suturing those southeastern Native peoples divided by Indian Removal into a collective history where they all face