Wanda Coleman – författare

Ostinato Vamps is Wanda Coleman's first book of poetry since the demise of her longtime publisher, Black Sparrow Press. It continues and enlarges the traits that have been her hallmark for more than three decades: a fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.Linguistically daring, lyrically breathtaking, stylistically bold, these poems both explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes. Life is difficult, often unfair, but it belongs to the living, as Coleman reminds us in no uncertain terms. Racing between an earthy eroticism and fatalistic despair, filled with humor and tragedy, these poems are alive. They breathe. They challenge us even as they reward us for seeking the truth.

The burnings from which Coleman culls her work casts a glow and unique warmth that invites the reader to sit by her metaphorical hearth, to laugh and enjoy their \u201cconversation.\u201d The contemplative and philosophical have entered her voice as she continues to explore the conflicts and confusions that shape the aesthetic terrain of Southern California and beyond—as she continues to grapple with cultural bias, malignant domestic neglect, poverty, and the damages of racism, yet broadening her palette of social ills to include the privacies of grief, loss and transcendence. A nominee and finalist for Poet Laureate of California, she continues to reflect the ethnic scramble of Los Angeles, where she has been honored by proclamations from the cityÆs elected officials, including the mayorÆs office, the city council and the Department of Cultural Affairs.

“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.”

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. Originally written for the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Ms. Coleman called these pieces “a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory.”We find the author 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. As Publisher's Weekly noted, “Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable.”

“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 Angelou’s “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.”

ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST—The New York Times and Washington PostA voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality—here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people’s poet, Wanda Coleman.Coleman was a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of her poems, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes. Rejected by the elites during her lifetime, here’s what people are saying now:—One of the year’s best! “These poems are wildly fun and inventive . . . and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion.”—New York Times—Winner, California Independent Bookseller Alliance ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Award 2020—“Required Reading” Bustle—“One of the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A.” The New Yorker—One of the year’s best! “Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit.”—Washington Post—“Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did.”—PoetryA self-made writer from Black Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman made art while living every day with racism, poverty, violence. Her triumph is in words that endure. It’s time for Coleman’s courageous, impassioned, inspiring, one-of-a-kind voice to reach readers everywhere.

“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.

There’s plenty of love between Wanda Coleman and Austin Straus, but it has an edge: every kiss, every snuggle, every touch is political. How to make a marriage work under the unyielding pressures of racial bigotry and cultural bias? How to maintain their creativity and independence as poets and artists faced with the daily pressures of survival? For over three decades, Coleman and Straus have grappled with these questions—and with one another. Together, they have built a wall of desire, carnal and spiritual, to shield them from an often unwelcoming world. The Love Project sings their blood oath in an open and jazzy verse that holds nothing back, offering to the world some of the better that has flowered between them.