Her father's fatal illness. The inner life of an urban charity
hospital. "Unfinished Ghost Stories." "American Sonnets." "Dreams." This
is vintage Wanda Coleman, the poet of the people.
Coleman wrote as a witness. 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.
The Nation said of Hand Dance: "Coleman's poems are an act of
liberation, meant to be experienced as something almost physical, like a
punch or a whipping . . . she wants her language to express anger, to
incite anger, and to shake all those who read it out of their
complacency."
A college dropout living in Black Los Angeles, Coleman was disregarded
by the establishment during her lifetime. It's time for her work to be
discovered by readers everywhere.
Poet 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."
