Off-Season City Pipe: Work

In poems as beautiful in their telling as they are powerful in their ethos, poet and memoirist Hedge Coke draws upon her background as a tobacco sharecropper, factory worker and fisherwoman, articulating the stark contrast between a tradition of labor that instills pride and builds strong communities with the modern-day reality of backbreaking work that fails to provide sustenance for the land or its people. **Allison Adelle Hedge Coke**, of Huron, Tsa la gi, French Canadian and European descent, is the author of the American Book Award-winning debut collection *Dog Road Woman* and the memoir *Rock, Ghost, Willow Deer*. She has been instrumental in creating Native American mentorship programs throughout the country and will join the faculty of Northern Michigan University in 2005.