Coleman, Wanda

The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Tremors

In this, her second collection of nonfiction prose, Wanda Coleman continues the project she began in Native in a Strange Land (1996), a project she once described as "a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through scattered fragments of my living memory." It is a sometimes antic tour, with unforgettable commentary - Coleman's "intermittent outcries, moans, shouts, and jubilations along the route."

The Riot Inside Me once again finds the author at the bloody crossroads where art and politics, the personal and the political, and L.A. and the larger world meet and trade blows before resuming their separate paths. The 26 pieces gathered here a "hopscotch" of essays, memoirs, interviews, and reports are divided into four sections. One collects autobiographical pieces, including a haunting memoir of her first husband, a moth drawn to the flames of the more extreme forms of '60s radicalism. Another section is reserved for polemics, mainly issues of Black & White; a third collects Coleman's now famous "bad" review of Maya Angelou's "Song Flung Up to Heaven" "the most controversial piece I've yet written" and a caustically funny report on its fallout. The book concludes with a group of essays on race, class, and poetry: pieces that one critic called "sardonic when it comes to politics and groups [but] tender and hopeful when it comes to individuals."

Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales: New Stories

Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. With this collection of thirteen new short stories, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles's unofficial poet laureate, proves an exception to the rule yet again. Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales owes its title to the lyrics of 'Lush Life' by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's right-hand man. Like the heartbroken lover of Strayhorn's song, the characters in these stories lead lonely lives full of longing, of potential stifled by racism, poverty, and absurd accidents of fate. And yet, even though they are trapped by the present moment, their inner lives are lush, a mirror of the city of angels in which they live, a metropolis, 'always simmering,' as Coleman writes in the final story, 'ever waiting to be borne on that balmy promised crescendo.'

Coleman applies a poet's economy of words to her fiction, setting a scene with lightning-quick strokes, letting a detail, a dialogue, or the brisk vernacular speak for itself. Or, alternatively, she will step in and take center stage, an omniscient voice seeing beyond the impending and inevitable tragedy, but powerless to change either narrative or outcome. Powerless, that is, only within the bounds of the story, for Coleman is an author devoted to change, personal and political, writing to affect the balance of power in America. 'Nothing will satisfy me,' she has written, 'short of an open society and social parity.'

Mercurochrome: New Poems

Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors

I first "met" Coleman when she was featured on a PBS special. She read some of her poems, and I was floored by their power. In this prose collection, I got to know her even better, through her essays and her interviews of artists Nikki Giovanni and Bob Marley. Her essays are crystalline insights on a world gone careless and L.A. in crisis. Within these short reflections are folks you know and others you'll want to meet. Coleman speaks of the facts and foibles of being human, of difference and of just getting through the day. She talks the talk!

In this collection of articles, essays, interviews and columns, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles' noted satirist, poet, and journalist, recounts three decades of the growth of her city and herself. Gleaned from the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Coleman says that these pieces offer "a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory."

We find the author--who is African-American, laboring as waitress, bartender, editor of a sleazy men's magazine--caught up in militant revolutionary politics and witnessing even more violent social upheaval in the form of the Watts and Rodney King riots.

While Coleman's life has been one of unique accomplishment, Publisher's Weekly notes, "Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable." In short, this book is a must-read for any student of the American condition.

Ostinato Vamps (Pitt Poetry Series)

"A poet whose angry and extravagant music, so far beyond baroque, has been making itself heard across the divide between West Coast and East, establishment and margins, slams and seminars, across the too-American rift among races and genders (there are more than two of each) for two decades."-From the jury's citation for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Ostinato Vamps continues and enlarges the traits that have been Wanda Coleman's hallmark for more than three decades: a fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line beneath her stanzas.

Linguistically daring, lyrically breathtaking, stylistically bold, these poems both explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes. Racing between an earthy eroticism and fatalistic despair, filled with humor and tragedy, these poems are alive. They breathe. They dance. Life is difficult, often unfair, but it belongs to the living, as Coleman reminds us in no uncertain terms.

Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, 1968-1986

Poet Wanda Coleman provides a how-to manual, revealing some immediate ways not only to "fix a bad man hex" or "do dirty better," but to keep one's dream-light burning amid the aching rush of dark and anxious times.

These poems and stories reflect the daily struggles of a poet-performer whose fight to survive is "plagued by the fear of not making it" ("Trying To Get In").
Poverty is an ever-present set of "claws" to grapple with, and in Coleman's realistically-apprehended present there's no way to beat the Man at his own game:

it's high noon
the sheriff is an IBM executive / it shoots 120 words per secretary
i reach for the white-out
it's too fast for me
i'm blown to blazes ("Job Hunter").
Passion and desire yield insights, also betrayals:
yes i do think of you
when i'm with him
even laugh out loud
remembering our summer's fun
how it might be fun again
still, something in his eyes
i do not see in yours ("Four Men").

Bathwater Wine

Winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Earthbound in Betty Grable's Shoes

Imagoes

African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems

Coleman is one of the decade's most moral poets, showing us in feverishly focused first- and third-person dramatic monologues the grim life of L.A.'s streets. It's impossible to paraphrase her colloquial, dynamic style: "where I live / the little gangsters diddy-bop through and pick up / young bitches and flirt with old ones, looking to / snatch somebody's purse or find their way into somebody's / snatch 'cause mama don't want them at home and papa / is a figment and them farms them farms them farms / they call schools, and mudflapped bushy-headed entities / swoop the avenue seeking death / it's the only thrill left / where I live." Understanding does not mean, to Coleman, mild forgiveness, it means hot rage against those of any color who prey on others in pain. Contextualizing murder, rape, poverty, addiction showing us their human faces gives Coleman a 'shattered heart,' makes her feel 'thrown heart first into this ruin,' but the experience transforms the reader. Pat Monaghan, Booklist