Blood Run (Earthworks Series) [Paperback]

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (Author)

Book Description

Series: Earthworks Series | Publication Date: November 15, 2007

This volume testifies to the need to protect the remarkable ruins of the Indigenous North American city of Blood Run and the sacred remains she guards there in mounded tombs. The persona poems herein emanate its character embraced in architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

If William Blake were a twenty-first-century American Indian woman, he would be Hedge Coke. Like Blake declaiming against soul-destroying "dark Satanic mills," Hedge Coke calls for us to recognize the sanctity of ancestral land and to protect it, for "no human should dismantle prayer." The specific land of which she speaks is a vast city built on the border of what is now Iowa and South Dakota. Home to as many as 10,000 people, it is now partially obliterated by plows and desecrated by looters. In a series of dramatic monologues, Hedge Coke animates the landscape and, indeed, the cosmos. Corn speaks, and various mounds; the river speaks, and deer and stone. Even the looters speak, as do the skeletons they remove for sale to medical schools. Blood Run is the setting for this long, dramatic sequence of poems, but its subject is really the need to resanctify the world. The poet's voice is oracular, deliberately disturbing and demanding. Hedge Coke's visionary long conclusion, "When the Animals Leave This Place," defines the transformation of Earth that follows disasters and offers a sensuous solace as well as a frightening prediction of what we may face as ecological change accelerates. An impressive book by an important poet. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke descends from moundbuilders and is of Cherokee, Huron, Creek, French Canadian, Lorraine, Portuguese, English, Scot, and Irish ascendants. Raised in North Carolina, the Plains and Canada, she previously worked horses, fields, waters, and factories. The MacDowell Colony/Black Earth Institute Fellow; professor, Institute of American Indian Arts (summer faculty, Naropa University); previously authored Dog Road Woman (American Book Award), Off-Season City Pipe (poetry, Coffee House Press); and Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (memoir, U.NE.).

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Salt Publishing (November 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844712664
• ISBN-13: 978-1844712663
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #842,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Land Enriched With Soul, March 18, 2008

By 

Kevin L. Nenstiel "omnivore" (Kearney, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blood Run (Earthworks Series) (Paperback)

Allison Hedge Coke bills this book of poetry as a "Verse Play," and I can imagine more than one way performers could stage this spectacle. But even if you read it straight off the page, as most people will, this book is an insightful, touching, and humbling experience.

Blood Run is a place, a city older than the range of human memory, a beating heart of Native American heritage in this country. And it's been looted and destroyed by white people who think anything Indian and old is fair game. Pieces of it are in museums, private collections, and textbooks worldwide, all without permission of the ancestral owners. Bits of Blood Run pop up on eBay from time to time, that's how desacralized it is. And the land has been broken by plows, home builders, and farmers until it is scarcely recognizable anymore.

Hedge Coke gives voice to the voiceless in this book. The land, the relics, the ancestors who built this city and cared for it until they had to see it destroyed in front of them -- all of them speak in this book. Those who destroyed Blood Run, whether from malice or simple blindness, are given a chance to answer. And in creating this dialogue, she creates a deft and enjoyable synthesis of various English-language poetic traditions with the sonorous communality of Native American orality.

The voices sing out to one another with an abandon they were never allowed in the real world. At one point, one of the burial mounds reminds us,

"I, dwell sculpted
loved, by a People of Creation

Wise men, blessed children, mothers of stars
slumber in perpetuum, the seat of my mass."

Some pages later, a Jesuit who has been sent to convert the Indians answers back:

"What lies here must be pagan,
but what pagan lies were old?
Could it be that Memory
rules this land enriched with soul?"

Hedge Coke resists the temptation to diminish or belittle anybody, even those she clearly considers desecrators. Everyone has a chance to tell their stories through her hands without being damned in advance. She takes sides, but she is not without sympathy for all who force their way into this story.

Whether for fans of poetry or avant-garde poetry, this book is a worthwhile investment of time. The range of knowledge and feeling will make you rethink yourself, and may spur you to action.


~(In the interest of full disclosure, I have studied under Allison Hedge Coke, and feel privileged to call her a colleague and friend. I write this opinion free of that influence, however, reading and writing simply as a friend and fan of contemporary verse.)~