Wanda Coleman Books

Wanda Coleman speaks clearly and powerfully in this book of poems. You won't find many "typical" love poems here -- the subject matter is sometimes brutal but always honest. My favorite poem in this collection is her account of the night that the fast food taco restaurant, where she was working, got held up. I won't spoil the poem for you because the unexpected outcome is part of the force of this poem. I'd highly recommend that you read it for yourself!

Beautifully written and wonderfully detailed, this book looks at literature by women who, in different ways, make "the West" their home. But Comer overturns defintions of the West as simply the old frontier and "the big sky." The West is black women in LA and Asian women in San Fransisco and Native Indian women writing about their modern lives. The book has very interesting interpretations of contempory women's literature, but the best part is the way it makes you re-think what you thought you knew about the "West." Put away your cowboy images, this book shows the West as a diverse region that has produced some of the best fiction writers in the nation.

A grabber that never lets go--I've read this powerful and moving novel a couple of times, and can't understand why everyone wasn't talking about it when it came out four years ago, and why they aren't still talking about it now. As a reality check, it transcends all PC and race issues. Reading it is a demanding but rewarding experience. Tamala, the unforgettable heroine, leaps off the page and into your heart. It certainly doesn't have a happy ending, but it is still an exhilarating one. I sat around for hours after reading it, absorbing the impact. Anyone who loves Coleman's short stories and poems will enjoy this action-jammed urban adventure. It's a must.

Worth the wait to receive this awesome book of poetry, prose, and pictures. An excellent Christmas gift for anyone who knows what it's like to work hard for the money.

Keep you dictionary close by, or a Wikipedia page up- hardly a poem went by that I didn't have to look something up or Google an arcane reference. But I think it's worth it. It's too vague a description perhaps but I love the rhythm of Coleman's poems, the way they flow down a page. Granted, you don't always know what you just "flowed" out of or into. She has this way, as do many poets, of saying something beautifully unintelligible; I frequently had the idea of a tapping her foot impatiently while a child completed a task, the task in this case being the deciphering of what was being said in the poem. But again- generally worth it. Poems like "south central los angeles deathtrip 1982", a series of vignettes about police brutality and corruption, and "amnesia fugue" are long, passionate, poems full of terrific imagery. One of my favorite lines in "amnesia fugue," which alternately addresses the speaker's father and an unnamed lover is

those tracks laid out from feet to horizon
spread your legs across them, cup your breasts
straddle the impact

Nice. Another fave of mine is "The Words are Still Burning" in which the speaker tells off a cousin who is well-educated but uppity, someone who imagines himself a social commentator while doing nothing to help society:

it doesn't take a degree in particle physics
to understand social injustice

thirty years of schmoozing over a chessboard,
empty rhetoric and chasing pu--y has not improved
your posture...
in your last incarnation you were pootbutt.in
this one, you are merely a poot (ll. 2-6, 9-10)

what you carry between your thighs is
not a sacred truth, but an integrity so minute
it can't even be detected with a magnifying glass (ll. 11-13)

how dare you complain that "little has changed"-
because in your cowardice you have not changed it... (ll. 29-30)

Not a bad read. There are many many diamonds in this rough if you'll dig. I'm betting the book is actually more of a gem than I have the patience to expound upon; my copy is all marked up with stars for emphasis, underlines, and copious footnotes from Wiki & Websters.

"anything worth having is worth working on and waiting for" -Betty Wright, "no pain, no gain" (or your momma, probably)

Kakalak 2006: An Anthology of Carolina Poets

Ms. Coleman's powerful collection MERCUROCHROME has just been nominated for the National Book Award in poetry. Quite an honor. Her last collection of poetry, BATHWATER WINE (Black Sparrow, 1998) won the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and her memoir LOVE-INS WITH NIETZSCHE (Wake Up Heavy, 2000) was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. It seems the literary world is standing up and taking note of one of our greatest modern poets.

Wanda Coleman has been publishing with Black Sparrow Press for nearly 25 years, which is amazing since she's only 55, and looks much younger than that. Even more amazing than the devotion she and BSP share, is the strength and vitality encompassed in each new volume they produce together. MERCUROCHROME, her latest, may be in fact her best. It is not too long, as the review above would suggest (her last collection of poems is nearly three years old now so there's plenty to print), nor is the power diluted. On the contrary, Coleman's voice is as strong as ever. And as diverse. I don't know if I've ever read a collection of sonnets or transliterations of mainly dead-white guys, that was so compelling. This book is as red-hot as the title suggests. Huzzah Wanda Coleman! P.S. I also wanted to praise the wonderful cover design by Barbara Martin on this, and so many other Black Sparrow books.

In this book, I'm talking back the rhythms that were stolen from my people. Our society has suppressed the spirit of African Americans, yet when I look around me and in the media, everybody is walking, talking and singing like black people. ~Wanda Coleman

Wanda Coleman's poems are wildly complex in form and I will admit to only understanding about a third of the hidden meanings. As I read her poems I am walking down dark streets when suddenly I turn a page and I am suddenly at home with a series of words. Then, I am thrown into a word maze again where words like odalisque, pandemic and narcoleptic pull my eyes hungrily across the pages of hurricane thoughts.

Wanda is known as an Urban Poet who has a love for unvarnished truth. She comments on everything from politics to hot love. Her poems dance with their own rhythm and are especially beautiful when she lets her goddess out to play. She is known for being one of the nation's best poet-performers.

While the complexity is inspiring and Wanda's use of words, stunning...I was so happy to find my way to the humor in "The History of My Body." Deep emotions dance between her words and sometimes she blatantly expresses inner torments like when she writes: "I have wrung my heart/in secret silence." At times her words seem to roll in hot lust or spring from the page in a mind jolting punch.

Wanda's poems inspire me to write and write. I write my own poems after reading her poems and I am amazed at how such complexity inspires my own awakening to myself. I understand her musings on some primal level where poets sometimes live but at times her language flies above me and I can't grasp at the meaning no matter how much I try. Sometimes I am so pleased to understand an entire poem and then I can wander through pages before enlightenment strikes again.

By the time I arrived at "Soul Traveler" I was writing my own poems. That is how much this book inspired me.

The poems are challenging and interesting and the vocabulary and visual images are just stunning:

...in rainbow-colored moss. There she thrived in volcanic
radiance & iridescent splendor yet she pined for
another world made steel by her false imaginings & in
the pitch of her moonless golden-apple grove she danced
her dissatisfactions amongst ghosts...

To write this way! What a dream.

~The Rebecca Review

OSTINATO VAMPS is a gloriously ambitious book. Taken together, its poems form a visionary history of black, white, brown, and beige. Similar to the speaker in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," the "I" in these poems is a conduit for voices from the ancient past, the 19th century, the noir 40s of big band swing, the 50s of hipster bebop, and contemporary America. This is art as history redeemed: "aesthetics is the science of vulnerability/ bruises transformed, wounds immortalized..." Coleman is a virtuoso of many styles, laying down Thelonious Monk or Miles Davis, Robert Johnson or Billie Holiday, and sometimes rap or gospel. In a gorgeous poem called "Plum Hunger," she manages to merge W. C. Williams and Duke Ellington. There are people who still think Renaissance music should cue the rhythm of our poems. Coleman demonstrates that true American prosody is based on our native music. This is an important book. Do not miss it.

[ostinato]: a musical figure repeated persistently at the same pitch throughout a composition. -- Webster

Wanda Coleman has been dubbed the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles and with OSTINATO VAMPS she continues the traits that have been her hallmark for more than three decades. Her style is lyrically breathtaking as she repeatedly weaves voices and snippets of blues lyrics into poetic expressions that focus on the human struggle. Her words do both, explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes, but her fidelity to the truth is buffered by the syncopated way she delivers. The poetry and prose possess a soaring openness and a biting wit, where socially imposed fate begins to burn in the reader's mind at the indifference of humankind. The empty sadness in the title 'Olio Intaglio', where a mother is left to suffer alone over the loss of her son, touches on how family and friends can be the cruelest of them all.

One caption refers to her as the poet with a warrior voice because of her inclination to peel away polite veneer and verbally dissect the heart of issues. She artfully reminds us that life is unfair, but it still belongs to the living. If you have a penchant for poetry that is rhythmic but not rhyming, that reaches to the core of a psycho-social America, I recommend OSTINATO VAMPS. It invites the mind to venture beyond its comfort zone.

Reviewed by aNN
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

Wanda Coleman is quickly becoming my favorite American poet. This collection, which I'm reading at the same time with her latest book MERCUROCRHOME, only reinforces my stance. As a young white male I shied away from Coleman's writing for quite some time, thinking, however ignorant this may seem, that I'd find nothing in common with her, nothing to relate to. When you're wrong you're wrong, and when I finally did dive into her work (her first book MAD DOG, BLACK LADY) I felt like I did when I first read Bukowski: I had found something special. Some have deemed Coleman as the "Black, female Bukowski," but of course this is too simple a comparison. They both hailed from the underbelly of LA, and both can't seem to get the city out of their blood. Coleman's poetry does share something with Bukowski's early lyricism, but beyond that there is no real comparison (the only other thing I can think of is that Black Sparrow has published nearly all of their books). Coleman's work is more studied and stylized, more diverse in technique and scope. I have had the great pleasure and honor now of actually publishing some of Coleman's work, and her power continues to blow me away. I look forward to every new piece she puts out there.

Bathwater Wine by Wanda Coleman is a book of poetry that everyone can relate to on one level or another. The poetry in this book is easy to read, realistic, and down to earth. Coleman writes about life events that many people can relate to. She has poured her heart and soul on the pages and the reader can easily see stages of her life in the poems. The book showcases all forms of poetry including sonnets and songs. Among the poems are "Jazz Whine," which is a dedication to Jazz music, but also a look at life lessons, "Levels of Meaning," which looks at what it means to be a woman and the many images it partakes, and "Firesong 1964," which is a dedication to the monk in Viet Nam who showed the world what he believed in. This book is a must for anyone who is discovering modern poetry for the first time. It is deep, but easy. It is Coleman, but it is also you and me. It is an All American book as portrayed by both the poems inside and the patriotic red, white, and blue cover. It is an excellent collection of poems from one of today's most profound poets.

Wanda Coleman's War of Eyes is a collection of short stories
about black people struggling to survive in the inner-city
of Los Angeles. Having never been there, I was hoping to
read something really compelling but didn't find it here.

Only three stories stood out to me: "The Big Little Gang,"
"Big Dreams" and "In the City of Sleep." The latter two
stories are true gems and deserve to be surrounded by
better stories. The problem is that most of the cities
I've already heard before. Coleman tries to say something
but fails to deliver in most of the stories, which came
across formulaic and flat.

I'm giving her two stories for "Big Dreams" and "In the City
of Sleep" but I recommend checking this one out from the
library instead.

When someone's work is usually referred to as visceral, the person doing the name-calling is usually referring to something ravagingly daring and unapologetic in the wor or the author's voice. In no other case is this more clear than in the work of Coleman. She strangles a common story's possible endings and finds the one most compelling one for her voice until it screams, and does so in fewer pages than most lauded authors. Her poems do this all the time, but her stories are gut-punches of the highest, most unforgiving literary tradition. The most astounding thing about her abilities is that she does so while not making the work trashy or for mere effect. Not for the meek of mind.

Wanda Coleman's "A War of Eyes and Other Stories" plunges the reader into some really sordid and/or tragic tales from urban African-American life. There is a lot of sex, profanity, and violence (with an emphasis on black-on-black violence). She also deals with such topics as gambling, illegal drugs, racial tension, and sexual dysfunction. The stories range from short 1- or 2-page character studies to the longest story, which is about 20 pages long. Throughout the book Coleman masterfully captures the rhythms of black vernacular English.

Some of the most vivid selections in the book are as follows: "Ladies," about an encounter between two black women, a professional counselor and a woman mired in poverty; "The Scream," a subtly horrific tale; "The Friday Night Shift at the Taco House Blues (Wah-Wah)," which is basically a slice from the life of an urban fast-food restaurant; and "Word Monkey," a richly ironic story about a black writer of the pimp-and-junky genre. But the most stunning story is the longest one, "Big Dreams," an intense study of a woman pursuing a dream.

With her raw, unapologetic style and subject matter, Coleman reminds me somewhat of Charles Bukowski, but her work is very much rooted in African-American female experience. But another author I would compare her to is Poe: many of Coleman's stories are truly horror stories. But her horror is not supernatural; rather, it is firmly rooted in urban reality, with its violence and socioeconomic pressure. Coleman is a writer from the edge whose work has real power.

This book came out a while ago. I read it and I thought, here's a writer as pure as James Purdy, as hip and relevant as Mary Gaitskill or Gary Indiana. Why haven't I heard of her? I thought she just did poetry. Many authors write books of short stories that are great, yet never have I read an author that has covered as much ground as Coleman in War of Eyes. I read it and I thought, how did she not lose her mind? What I love the most about her short stories is how they have many beats. So many things happen in one story you wonder how she gets from A to Z so flawlessly and so beautifully without any self consciousness. I hesitate to compare her to other black writers like Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kinkaid because she trancends their P.C. conceits so ferociously that she should only be compared to the greatest writers of all time, regardless of race. Wanda Coleman is FIERCE.

This book is actually two: 1979's "Mad Dog Black Lady" and the 1990 "African Sleeping Sickness". Both are incredibly powerful collections of poetry (with some stories), and the sheer volume of work contained here (328 pgs, with almost a poem for every 2 on average) is almost enough to make you OD on poetry. The work is strong stuff, with stories of love, sex and danger throughout, and Coleman's voice is so hardcore compelling you don't know if you should read the bok or run from it.

Captures the biting energy of her short stories in poetic form. Wow.

THE RIOT INSIDE ME: More Trials and Tremors is everything the 60s, 70s and 80s were--turbulent waves of social, political and emotional upheaval that segue into placid pools of self-acceptance, artistic talent and bittersweet reflection. With raw candor and compelling prose, Wanda Coleman vividly recreates her journey to the woman she is now--an awesome whirlwind of extraordinary literary stature.

Coleman's personal history from the 1950's to 2005, is revealed through essays, interviews, journals and letters--creating an autobiography that is not only a testament to the enduring perseverance of one black woman, but of her willingness to share the humor, as well as the tears, which litter the highways and side streets of her incredible life.

In an age when the memoir has taken a beating, Coleman's THE RIOT INSIDE ME emerges as an example of not only how beautiful, but how powerful a memoir can be when executed in the essence of the art.

Reviewed by Cxandra
for The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers