Off-Season City Pipe

An American Book Award-winning poet explores her working-class heritage against the backdrop of urban poverty. Drawing on her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker, and fisherwoman, Hedge Coke's poems are as vivid in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos. Off-Season City Pipe lyrically articulates the stark contrast between an ancestry whose strong work ethic, manual skills, and environmental stewardship defined their communities, but whose present circumstances have forced so many into impoverished city living, performing work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the winner of the 2005 Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year award for Poetry.