Look at This Blue

Allison's fourth book of poetry with Coffee House. She already has a devoted readership, and this timely, dynamic, wise book should expand her audience even further.
Allison is a healer, a mediator, a "deep and resisting heart" who has made an explicit choice to approach the world with love and optimism. So while Look at This Blue is a powerful, raging indictment of environmental destruction and government abuses (think Daniel Borzutzky's Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018), it's also hopeful and generous, generously offering the holistic approach to Earth care practiced by First Nations peoples as an antidote to climate crisis. The refrain "Look at this blue" occurs throughout the book, offering respite by calling the reader to look carefully at water, sky, feathers, wings.
A love song to California: deeply rooted in Allison's long, personal relationship with California's people, geography, flora and fauna.
Uses "artifacts" of historical text-border patrol death reports, Californian government statements, lists of extinct plant and animal species-in a way that will interest readers of Tracy K Smith's Wade in the Water.
For readers of Bob Kaufman, Alice Notley, Eleni Sikelianos, Joy Harjo, Layli Long Soldier, LeAnne Howe, and Heid E. Erdrich.