Bøger af Wanda Coleman

¿Satire and journalism are alive and well in L.A., at least when Wanda Coleman is doing the biting and the reporting.¿¿Publishers WeeklyThe Riot Inside Me once again finds the author at the crossroads where art and politics, the personal and the political, and L.A. and the larger world meet. The 26 pieces gathered here¿a ¿hopscotch¿ of essays, memoirs, interviews, and reports¿include a haunting memoir of her first husband, a moth drawn to the flames of the more extreme forms of ¿60s radicalism, and Coleman¿s now famous ¿bad¿ review of Maya Angeloüs ¿Song Flung Up to Heaven¿¿¿the most controversial piece I¿ve yet written¿ ¿ and a caustically funny report on its fallout.Of this nonfiction collection, the Los Angeles Times said: ¿Coleman is best known for her `warrior voice.¿ But her voice too can weep elegiac, summoning memories of childhood¿s neighborhoods ¿ her South L.A.¿s wild-frond palms, the smog-smear of pre-ecology consciousness. Her voice hits notes as desperate as Billie Holiday¿s tours of sorrow¿s more desolate stretches. But it can also land a wily punch line as solid as that of a stand-up comic.¿

A self-made writer from Black Los Angeles who lived every day with racism, poverty, violence. The triumph is in words that endure. ¿Having Lost My Son, I Confront the Wreckage.¿ ¿The Language Beneath the Language.¿ ¿They Will Not Be Poets.¿ ¿Dreams Without Means.¿ ¿American Sonnets.¿ This is vintage Coleman, the poet of the people.National Book Award in Poetry finalist, Mercurochrome is one of Coleman¿s most powerful collections. With humor, anger, and sorrow, she captures the deeply personal and societal forces of a Black working woman and mother, always behind in rent, always writing. She captured her world and its truths with beauty, harshness, clarity, and power. Through it all, there is passionate love and sexuality, humor and drama ¿ her work is full of startling confession and breathtaking power. loveas i live it seems more like mercurochromethan anything elsei can conjure up. it looks so pretty and red,and smells of a balmycoolness when you uncap the little applicator.but swab it on anopen sore and you nearly die under the stabbing burn. recoveryleaves a vague tenderness Terrance Hayes says, ¿Wanda Coleman was a great poet, a real in-the-flesh, flesh-eating poet who also happened to be a real black woman. Amid a life of single motherhood, multiple marriages, and multiple jobs that included waitress, medical file clerk, and screenwriter, she made poems. She denounced boredom, cowardice, the status quo. Few poets of any stripe write with as much forthrightness about poverty, about literary ambition, about depression, about our violent, fragile passions.¿A college drop-out, spurned by the literary establishment during her life, it's time for Wanda Coleman¿s courageous, impassioned, one-of-a-kind voice to reach readers everywhere.

The lives of the urban desperate in their unending struggle to keep afloat in an always dangerous environment circumscribed by racism and poverty. ¿Extraordinary stories, told in a powerful voice.¿¿Los Angeles Times Book ReviewWanda Coleman wrote as a witness, whether as a poet, in fiction, or journalism. She captured her world and its truths, of life with the constants of race, fear, poverty, gender, inequality, oppression. Through it all, there is passionate love and sexuality, humor and drama ¿ her work is full of startling confession and breathtaking power.Terrance Hayes wrote, ¿Wanda Coleman was a great poet, a real in-the-flesh, flesh-eating poet who also happened to be a real black woman. Amid a life of single motherhood, multiple marriages, and multiple jobs that included waitress, medical file clerk, and screenwriter, she made poems. She denounced boredom, cowardice, the status quo. Few poets of any stripe write with as much forthrightness about poverty, about literary ambition, about depression, about our violent, fragile passions.¿War of Eyes is for anyone who loves powerful fiction.

¿Wanda Coleman is best known for what has often been termed her `warrior voice¿ ¿ Coleman¿s poet¿s voice too can weep elegiac, summoning memories of her childhood¿s neighborhoods ¿ her South LA¿s wild-frond palms, the smog smear of pre-ecology consciousness.¿¿Los Angeles TimesIn Imagoes, Wanda Coleman blends memory with the reality of her present through an idiom that oscillates seamlessly between natural imagery and the urban edifice of Los Angeles. Booklist called it: ¿Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music.¿

“Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit.”—Washington Post“Terrifying and fearlessly inventive.”—New York TimesThe first complete collection of Wanda Coleman’s original and inventive sonnets. Long regarded as among her finest work, these one hundred poems give voice to loving passions, social outrage, and hard-earned wisdom. Wanda Coleman was a beat-up, broke Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and ruthless intelligence: “to know, i must survive myself,” she wrote in “American Sonnet 7.” A poet of the people, she created the experimental “American Sonnet” form and published them between 1986 and 2001. The form inspired countless others, from Terrance Hayes to Billy Collins.Drawn from life’s particulars, Coleman’s art is timeless and universal. In “American Sonnet 61” she writes:reaching down into my griot bagof womanish wisdom and wilysocial commentary, i come up with brickswith which to either reconstructthe past or deconstruct a head....from the infinite alphabet of afrobluesintertwinings, i cull apocalyptic visions(the details and lovers entirely real)and articulate my voyage beyond thatpoint where self disappearsThese one hundred sonnets—borne from influences as diverse as Huey P. Newton and Herman Melville, Amiri Baraka and Robert Duncan—tell Coleman’s own tale, as well as the story of Black and white America. From “American Sonnet 2”:towards the cruel attentions of violent opiatesas towards the fatal fickleness of artistic raintowards the locusts of social impotence itselfi see myself thrown heart first into this ruinnot for any crimebut beingThis is a collection of electrifying truth that only an artist such as Wanda Coleman can deliver.

'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 PostNobody 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.

This is the sixth book by Los Angeles poet and short story writer Coleman.

"In The World Falls Away, Wanda Coleman's poems glow with an almost radioactive edginess. Yet, there is also range and substance giving her intense American voice staying power. To use, Whitman's word, her work has 'amplitude.'" -Diane Wakoski

Past winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, this long-time author from Black Sparrow Press is known for her fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.