13 Books Published by David R. Godine, Publisher on AALBC — Book Cover Collage
Heart First Into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Jun 21, 2022)
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Featuring an introdcution by Mahogany L. Browne
“Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging…potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit.”—Washington Post
“Terrifying and fearlessly inventive.”—New York Times
The first complete collection of Wanda Coleman’s original and inventive sonnets. Long regarded as among her finest work, these one hundred poems give voice to loving passions, social outrage, and hard-earned wisdom.
Wanda Coleman was a beat-up, broke Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and ruthless intelligence: "to know, i must survive myself," she wrote in “American Sonnet 7.” A poet of the people, she created the experimental “American Sonnet” form and published them between 1986 and 2001. The form inspired countless others, from Terrance Hayes to Billy Collins.
Drawn from life’s particulars, Coleman’s art is timeless and universal. In "American Sonnet 61" she writes:
reaching down into my griot bag
of womanish wisdom and wily
social commentary, i come up with bricks
with which to either reconstruct
the past or deconstruct a head….
from the infinite alphabet of afroblues
intertwinings, i cull apocalyptic visions
(the details and lovers entirely real)
and articulate my voyage beyond that
point where self disappears
These one hundred sonnets—borne from influences as diverse as Huey P. Newton and Herman Melville, Amiri Baraka and Robert Duncan—tell Coleman’s own tale, as well as the story of Black and white America. From "American Sonnet 2"
towards the cruel attentions of violent opiates
as towards the fatal fickleness of artistic rain
towards the locusts of social impotence itself
i see myself thrown heart first into this ruin
not for any crime
but being
This is a collection of electrifying truth that only an artist such as Wanda Coleman can deliver.
Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems
by Wanda Coleman and Edited by Terrance HayesBlack Sparrow (Apr 07, 2020)
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A voice the world needs — the award-winning, groundbreaking, poet Wanda Coleman. Editor Terrance Hayes has selected more than 130 poems, spanning four decades, for this powerful gathering of Coleman’s work that bestselling author Mary Karr has called, “words to crack you open and heal you where it counts.”
“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
Jazz And Twelve O’Clock Tales: New Stories
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Jan 01, 2008)
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Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. With this collection of thirteen new short stories, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles’s unofficial poet laureate, proves an exception to the rule yet again. Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales owes its title to the lyrics of ’Lush Life’ by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington’s right-hand man. Like the heartbroken lover of Strayhorn’s song, the characters in these stories lead lonely lives full of longing, of potential stifled by racism, poverty, and absurd accidents of fate. And yet, even though they are trapped by the present moment, their inner lives are lush, a mirror of the city of angels in which they live, a metropolis, ’always simmering,’ as Coleman writes in the final story, ’ever waiting to be borne on that balmy promised crescendo.’
Coleman applies a poet’s economy of words to her fiction, setting a scene with lightning-quick strokes, letting a detail, a dialogue, or the brisk vernacular speak for itself. Or, alternatively, she will step in and take center stage, an omniscient voice seeing beyond the impending and inevitable tragedy, but powerless to change either narrative or outcome. Powerless, that is, only within the bounds of the story, for Coleman is an author devoted to change, personal and political, writing to affect the balance of power in America. ’Nothing will satisfy me,’ she has written, ’short of an open society and social parity.’
The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Tremors
by Wanda ColemanDavid R. Godine (Mar 25, 2005)
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In this, her second collection of nonfiction prose, Wanda Coleman continues the project she began in Native in a Strange Land (1996), a project she once described as ""a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed
Mercurochrome
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Jul 01, 2001)
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Coleman’s courageous, impassioned voice, defiantly affirming itself in the face of social injustice and institutional dehumanization, rings out clearer than ever in her new book, Mercurochrome. So does her sensuous, vivid, tactile “verbal mandala”:
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…
These high-energy, incandescent poems turn up the emotional thermostat, sizzling and shooting off sparks.
Mambo Hips and Make Believe
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Aug 01, 1999)
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Fiction. Wanda Coleman’s powerful new novel chronicles the friendship between two women — one from the black ghetto of Los Angeles, one from its white middle-class suburbs. Both are aspiring writers, both scramble to pay their bills by picku
Bathwater Wine
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Jul 01, 1998)
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Wanda Coleman: winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2012 Shelley Memorial Award Winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Sep 01, 1996)
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In this collection of articles, essays, interviews and columns, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles’ noted satirist, poet, and journalist, recounts three decades of the growth of her city and herself. Gleaned from the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, T
Hand Dance
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Feb 01, 1993)
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The poems and prose of Coleman’s sixth book, Hand Dance, show a wry political awareness (""inside this poor person is a rich one / struggling to come out""), a streetwise knowledge of what it means to be black in urban American (""in the world i
African Sleeping Sickness: Stories and Poems
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Oct 01, 1990)
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Coleman is one of the decade’s most moral poets, showing us in feverishly focused first- and third-person dramatic monologues the grim life of L.A.’s streets. It’s impossible to paraphrase her colloquial, dynamic style: ""where I live / the li
A War of Eyes
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Apr 01, 1988)
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Book by Coleman, Wanda
Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories, 1968-1986
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Aug 01, 1987)
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Poet Wanda Coleman provides a how-to manual, revealing some immediate ways not only to ""fix a bad man hex"" or ""do dirty better,"" but to keep one’s dream-light burning amid the aching rush of dark and anxious times. These poems and stories re
Mad Dog, Black Lady
by Wanda ColemanBlack Sparrow (Jun 01, 1979)
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This is the first book of poetry of Wanda Coleman, a freelance writer from Los Angeles who has published more than 20 books and was a 2005 finalist for California Poet Laureate. The poems are politically aware, darkly humorous, sensual and i