Wanda Coleman

The time has never been better for this re-introduction of Wanda Coleman's work to a new audience of readers.

Selected Poems

Wicked Enchantment

'Hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent' Mary Karr '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.

A collection of poems by twentieth-century American poet Wanda Coleman.

New Poems

Mercurochrome

Mahogany L. Browne (Editor)

The Complete American Sonnets

Heart First into This Ruin

Erzählungen

Blues

Mad Dog Black Lady

American Sonnets

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 “conversation.” 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 city’s elected officials, including the mayor’s office, the city council and the Department of Cultural Affairs.

The World Falls Away

bell hooks

Maya Angelou

Harryette Mullen

Pat Parker

Sonia Sanchez

Alice Walker

Audre Lorde

Gwendolyn Brooks

Cheryl Clarke

Nikki Giovanni

June Jordan

Rita Dove

Lucille Clifton

Nikky Finney

Angelina Weld Grimké

Amina Baraka

Jayne Cortez

Gwendolyn Bennett

Esta antologia oferece um panorama inédito da poesia negra feita por mulheres nos Estados Unidos no século XX, reunindo dezenove poetas com uma amostra significativa de suas produções e linguagens. Ao lado de nomes já reverenciados no Brasil, como Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, bell hooks e Alice Walker, estão poetas ainda pouco conhecidas que constituem o canône da literatura negra mundial. Caso das pioneiras Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett e Gwendolyn Brooks, e representantes da poesia falada e engajada, como Jayne Cortez e Amina Baraka, que despontaram nos anos 1960 e 1970. Período de grande efervescência da cultura negra nos Estados Unidos, as décadas do Black Arts Movement e do Black Power coincidem, não por acaso, com as primeiras publicações das sólidas carreiras de grande parte dessas poetas, como Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Pat Parker e June Jordan, seguidas por autoras como Cheryl Clarke, Nikky Finney, Wanda Coleman e ainda as premiadíssimas Harryette Mullen, Rita Dove e Sonia Sanchez. Organizado por Lubi Prates, "Você lembrará seus nomes" conta com um time de tradutoras negras brasileiras renomadas, sendo a maior parte delas também poetas, além de pequenas biografias das autoras reunidas, contextualizando suas vidas e obras.

Antologia de poetas negras dos Estados Unidos do século XX

Você lembrará seus nomes

"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.

More Trials & Tremors

The Riot Inside Me

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.

Poems

Ostinato Vamps

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

Bathwater Wine

Wanda Coleman

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