Award-winning poet and activist Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (Huron/Metis/mixed Cherokee, SE Native) writes the type of poetry that is seared into the mind like a daguerreotype at the shortest exposure. Fittingly, her latest collection is titled Burn (MadHat Press, 2017) and is an illustrated poetic endeavor. How cool is that?
Before you dive into that book, try some of her more earthy work, like “Stung,” from the anthology If Bees Were Few: A Hive of Bee Poems. You’lll want Santa to bring you that one.
And while you’re out there floating in cyberspace, check out this Pen Ten interview with Heid E. and her sister, fellow writer Louise Erdrich, where the ladies answer questions (presented by Natalie Diaz) on writing in general and space for the voices of indigenous women.
With the definition of “Asian-American” constantly in flux, broader and broader intersections of ethnicity have begun to fall under this umbrella. In the poetry realm, there has been a surge in new work from Korean-, Vietnamese- and mixed race-Americans. And while I’ve only just begun to investigate this fascinating universe, I’ve found some truly BadA$$ work that simply must be shared. (My picks followed by a quick list of where to find new poems.)
MY TOP FIVE:
1. Sally Wen Mao, who first came to my attention several years ago when she hit the pages of Cave Walland Drunken Boat and now has a new collection out with Alice James Books.
Under the ocean where I was created
in a womb of dancing atoms, a tectonic tale
is breaking the skin of sea floor. Dreams burn here:
lava flows underwater like bleeding fireballs,
sunless sleep disturbed as they listened
for the sound of the nightmares they dropped.
Fat Man and the Little Boy drop,
like two suns tumbling, sent to destroy creation,
no one will be left alive to listen
for the lessons we need to learn from this tale,
just a skyline made of a blossoming fireball
and a symphony of silenced screams horrible beyond…
I am also rather fond of this one, originally published at Blackbird:
PAPER SUNS
My love. I tended him
after he fell. His charred wing stumps,
his elegy of scabbed feathers. Only then
would he accept a bed, me
in it. The memory burnt into his limbs
burned me, too, so that only my negative remained
in what amputated dreams he had, what
eerie ornithology haunted him. My hybrid,
neither bird nor angel—I came
to gather what boy there was left
to salvage.
I fold him paper suns, light them
on fire, hurl them skyward,
a revenge I can offer.
For a moment, the sun in his face,
twinned in his eyes.
For a moment, not the sun, but his face,
its reflection like the sun,
like an old story. In the water,
another sky, a ghost sun.
He didn’t know at first
if he was falling or…
On the other side of the world, there is a language I have never heard
It is beautiful, and in this dying tongue, there are words for Love and God
that resemble Bread and Wing
Or another forest language in which Mother and Knife
equal Drawer and Sing
And Island Wood is somewhere Desert Milk
And Berry, elsewhere is a Door
And if you added up all these dying words, and the people who speak them
All their memories, histories, and lessons
All their gods, jokes, rituals, and recipes
If you learned and stirred them, over and again, until
each utterance became a star, a new footprint, the marrow of a poem—
*originally appeared on Broadside from Red Dragonfly Press
Under the ocean where I was created
Bonespark~ 