Experience the work of Wanda Coleman from Black Sparrow Press
“Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent.”—The Washington Post
- Winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award
- Winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems
“As a poet, mother, Los Angeles native, black woman, essayist, and more, Wanda Coleman is a master of honesty. Her writing is an artifact of a life defined by brilliance, outspokenness, and survival.”—Courtney Taylor, SLICE
“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.” —Terrance Hayes
“Wanda Coleman’s peerless Wicked Enchantment has words to crack you open and heal you where it counts—hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent. All honor to her name.” —Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author
Mercurochrome
“Wanda Coleman’s poetry stings, stains, and ultimately helps heal wounds like the old-fashioned mercurochrome of her title. No easy remedy for the lacerating American concerns of racism and gender bias, Coleman’s poetry transforms pain into empathy. . . these searing, soaring poems challenge us to repair the fractures of human difference, and feel what it is to be made whole again.”—The National Book Award Poetry Judges 2001, Stanley Plumly, Chair
Bathwater Wine
“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.” —from the jury’s citation for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
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.”—The Nation
Imagoes
“Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music . . .”—Booklist
Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors
“Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable.” —Publisher’s Weekly
The Riot Inside Me: More Trial and Tremors
“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.”—Los Angeles Times
War of Eyes
“These are extraordinary stories, told in a powerful voice. This is the painful reality of the powerlessness that is too often shrouded in bureaucratic anonymity—a probation number, a welfare case number. Coleman, with her fine poet’s eye and strong intense language, brings to life their somber existences.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review, front page