Customer Reviews

Dog Road Woman

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Dog Road Woman received the Before Columbus foundation American Book Award on September 5th, 1998. As Allison Adelle Hedge Coke read on April 14th at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion, her voice added another dimension to already profound poems. This collection of 22 poems is like "an autobiographical sketch of a contemporary mixed-blood native life. These poems recount surviving diaspora, domestic violence, racism, and an extraordinary number of challenges." Allison uses writing as a vehicle to take herself and us from one place to another, psychologically and geographically. Since her work is mainly inspired from her personal experience, knowing some major aspects of Allison's life brings the poems closer to us in meaning and in purpose. She shares with us the proof of a powerful will for survival and pride. Her "work is a catalyst" for sanity, love, and humanity. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke believes in hope and possibilities. Her poetry is straight forward, honest and real, and never falls into self-pity and dark cynicism. It talks about anger but never spite. Since Dog Road Woman does not have Allison's biography, I added here a piece from Reinventing the Enemy's Language, edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird. I believe that this bio-abstract will help you understand Allison's poetry better. Allison introduces herself: " I am a mixed Canadian: Native Huron and Tsalagi (North Carolina), French Canadian and Portuguese. I grew up mostly in North Carolina but also in Canada during the summers. We stayed with various relatives in other areas as well and I spent a great deal of time in South Dakota. ...I have gone from working in the fields of tobacco in North Carolina and sweet potatoes to working for an international Indian organization based in Los Angeles. I have had a very varied life. Two things which affected me a lot are my father's belief in traditional values and my mother's insanity. I still deal with this in my work, as it is still a big part of my life. ...I always wrote. As soon as I could write words, I used them in different ways to describe my feelings, observances, and experiences. I often felt like a witness as a child and wrote volumes which I never showed anyone hoping that someone would find them when I died. I believed I would die very young given the circumstances of my youth and my extreme close calls with death. These included reactions to local anesthetics and antibiotics, attempts made on my life by people very close to me, and severe automobile wrecks. I lived in battering situations as a child and as an adult. I am lucky to be alive now... A lot of my work also deals with abuse and its effects on the psyche. We have to stop this current before it floods our very existence. I believe in change. Some we experience through no fault of our own and others we create as a means of correction. The latter part of change is often a direct result of the former."

(editorial note: misprint in "The Change." William Morris is supposed to be Philip Morris. Confirmed by Allison Hedge Coke on April 14th, 2000).

The poems in this collection weave magnificent stories out of amazingly arranged and chosen language. The voice in the poems chants unhesitatingly about horrors endured and the triumph at being unbroken despite the horrors. The wisdom in the voice seems to speak beyond personal experience as well, touching a memory that is much more expansive than what has been lived. Perhaps a connection to something larger that many people ignore or do not have access to. This expansiveness, this beyondness, its presence in the poems shines constantly, making the truth embodied in the words recognizable instantly, like only something that has always been known but may have been forgotten can be inherently recognized. The words of the poems all seem to have this marvelous rhythm as well, something much more rich than music. Sometimes soft yet insistent, sometimes a blasting explosion of images and thoughts, all of it beautiful and wonderful.

There are good reasons Hedge Coke's debut collection won the American Book Award. These poems tell powerful stories in powerful language.
A brilliant collection from an important new Cherokee writer.
Highly recommended!