Dog Road Woman

by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Autobiographical sketch of Hedge Coke, a mixed-blood woman, presented in her debut collection of poems.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566890616
• ISBN13: 9781566890618
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 16 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 11 and higher

Customer Reviews

American Book Award Winner

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!

"Dangerous Truth"

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