Native in a Strange Land - Trials & Tremors

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. Originally written for the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Ms. Coleman called these pieces "a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory."

We find the author laboring as waitress, bartender, editor of a sleazy men's magazine--caught up in militant revolutionary politics and witnessing even more violent social upheaval in the form of the Watts and Rodney King riots. As Publisher's Weekly noted, "Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable."

About the author

Wanda Coleman-poet, storyteller and journalist-was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. Coleman was awarded the prestigious 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Bathwater Wine from the American Academy of Poets, becoming the first African-American woman to ever win the prize, and was a bronze-medal finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for Mercurochrome. In 2020, poet Terrance Hayes edited and introduced a selection of her work, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems, the first new collection of her work since her death in 2013.

Summary

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. Originally written for the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Ms. Coleman called these pieces “a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory.”

We find the author laboring as waitress, bartender, editor of a sleazy men's magazine--caught up in militant revolutionary politics and witnessing even more violent social upheaval in the form of the Watts and Rodney King riots. As Publisher's Weekly noted, “Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable.”

Additional text

“Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent.”—The Washington Post

Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems: “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
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
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
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
Imagoes: “Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music . . .”—Booklist

Product details

• Authors: Wanda Coleman
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.09.1996
• EAN: 9781574230222
• ISBN: 978-1-57423-022-2
• No. of pages: 179
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Education > Social education, social work; Los Angeles, History, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures, California, Social discrimination & inequality, Gender studies: women, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, CULTURAL HERITAGE / African American