Effigies

It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples steeped in ideologies, practical and philosophic systems, they do not overcome the lingual sensibilities and prowess of the poets representing the areas of the planet present in this text. Instead the poets overcome the intrusion.

From baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume, to white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu, fertile Pacific essence swells these poems into hummock ice knolls, into layers and layers of white sea laps rolling, into mindfulness, consideration, climate care--belonging.

From ulu, to cane knife, where aurora’s green vein bleeds blue and tangles into indigo or green-robed mauna combs t? stalks, palms, kukui, and pines. From Barrow to Waihe’e, tethered and hammered through wild among dark branches and snared by voices, these poems harbor whale and seal oil burning to bring sustenance to a reader’s search for light and with them carry us into a seafaring world of rich embrace. Spectacular, immediate, these beaches and beeches along the shores provide a tactile relationship made immense in their stream-crafted images.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke descends from moundbuilders and is of Cherokee, Creek, Huron, Metis, French Canadian, Lorraine, Portuguese, Irish, English, and Scot ascendants. Raised in North Carolina, the Plains and Canada, she previously worked horses, fields, waters, and factories. A fellow of the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, Black Earth Institute (emeritus), Salon Ada, and The Center for Great Plains Institute. dg nanouk okpik is an Alaskan Native, Inupiat — Inuit from Anchorage, Alaska. She is a Cook Inlet Region, Inc. shareholder as an enrolled member of federally recognized Tribe. Her family resides in Barrow, Alaska. She has served as secretary on both the American Indian Higher Education Consortium Student Congress and the Student Senate at Salish Kootenai College. dg nanouk okpik is an MFA candidate of Stonecoast, USM. Cathy Tagnak Rexford is Inupiaq, French/German and English from Anchorage, Alaska. Most of Cathy's work is inspired by the unique view of the Indigenous peoples of Northern Alaska. She has worked extensively in Native education and language efforts as researcher, curriculum developer and graphic designer. Cathy has also worked on contemporary Native theater and film projects as an actor, producer and writer. Brandy Nalani McDougall is a poet of Hawaiian, Chinese and Scottish descent from the island of Maui. An award-winning poet, she has published in journals and anthologies throughout Hawai‘i, the continental U.S. and the Pacific. Her first collection will be released in 2008. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Mahealani Perez-Wendt (formerly Mahealani Kamauu) is of Spanish, Hawaiian, and Chinese ancestry. She attended Kalaheo Elementary, Royal Elementary and Central Intermediate Schools, graduating from Kamehameha School for Girls in 1965. She earned a BA in political science and graduate certificate in public administration from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. In 1993, she received the Cades Literary Award. Her first book, Uluhaimalama was published in 2008.