11 Books Published by David R. Godine, Publisher on Our Site — Book Cover Mosaic

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.’

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

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.

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

Wanda Coleman: winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2012 Shelley Memorial Award Winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

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

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

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

Book by Coleman, Wanda

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

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