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In this substantial selection of her occasional journalism, poet Wanda Coleman has judiciously reshaped articles, essays, interviews and columns written over three decades (for, among other places, the Los Angeles Times. L.A. Weekly and The Free Press) into a nearly-seamless personal narrative: "a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory".
A collection of poems by twentieth-century American poet Wanda Coleman.
A selection of poems by the great american poetess Wanda Coleman, with calligraphy and layout by Jean-Jacques Tachdjian
'Essential reading' Roger Robinson 'Hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent' Mary Karr 'Sure, wise and devastating . . . a joy' Caleb Azumah Nelson 'Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent' Washington Post Nobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about making ends meet, about the history of the slave trade or the comedy of the daily grind, with the same breathtaking originality and brio; and few writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about their everyday experience of life - and love - in an unjust world. This is the first ever UK publication of the poetry of Wanda Coleman: a beat-up, broke and Black woman who wrote with defiance, humour and clarity about her life on the margins, and who went overlooked by the establishment for decades - even as she was known colloquially as 'the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles'. Wicked Enchantment gathers 130 of Coleman's poems in a selection by Terrance Hayes. Funny, angry, endlessly alive and written with an immediacy and frankness that captivate, here is the essential work of a poet of fierce resistance and self-belief against the odds.
The lot of a woman whose malformed sexual organs preclude intercourse. She suffers from loneliness and contemplates suicide, her sole consolation the friendship of another woman.
"Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music in this sixth book by Los Angeles poet and short story writer Coleman."?Booklist
"The Riot Inside Me finds the author at the bloody crossroads where art and politics, the personal and the political, and Southern California and the wider world meet and trade blows before resuming their separate paths. The twenty-five items gathered here - a "hopscotch" of essays, memoirs, interviews, journal entries, letters, and reports - are divided into four sections. One collects intimate autobiographical pieces, including a moving portrait of her late first husband, a moth drawn to the flames of the more extreme forms of '60s radicalism. Another is reserved for polemics, mainly issues of Black, White, Brown, and Yellow. A third reprints Coleman's infamous "bad" review of Maya Angelou's A Song Flung Up to Heaven - "the most controversial piece I've written" - and a caustically funny report on its fallout. The book concludes with a group of essays on racial violence, poetry and the post-9/11 mindset, topical pieces that are sardonic when it comes to politics and groups but, like all of Coleman's writing, tender and hopeful when it comes to individuals."--BOOK JACKET.
Winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize "Coleman is 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, for two decades. She excels in public performance...but her poems do not require her physical presence: they perform themselves."--Marilyn Hacker, from the jury's citation for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
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