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.
love
as i live it seems more like mercurochrome
than anything else
i can conjure up. it looks so pretty and red,
and smells of a balmy
coolness when you uncap the little applicator.
but swab it on an
open sore and you nearly die under the stabbing
burn. recovery
leaves 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.
