Mercurochrome - by Wanda Coleman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

The work of Wanda Coleman from Black Sparrow Press

Heart First into this Ruin

"Essential....one of the most important and surprising voices in American poetry."
--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Poems of force and wisdom."
--Boston Globe

One of the year's best-- The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the California Independent Bookseller Alliance

"These poems are wildly fun and inventive . . . and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion."--New York Times

"Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit."--Washington Post

"Wanda Coleman's peerless Wicked Enchantment has words to crack you open and heal you where it counts--hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent."--Mary Karr

Required Reading--Bustle

"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."--Slice

Mercurochrome

"In the decade since her death, Coleman's greatness is gaining widespread recognition....Her radicalness here is not one of formal experimentation but of accountability for her damaged yet resilient psyche as a child born in 1946, during Jim Crow segregation. She gives voice to that which might otherwise remain unspoken."
-- Adam Bradley, New York Times' T Magazine

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