Hand Dance
Will be published approx. on 5. August 2010
Book
Paperback/Softback
275 pages
978-0-87685-896-7 (ISBN)
Description
Her father's fatal illness. The inner life of an urban charity hospital. "Unfinished Ghost Stories." "American Sonnets." "Dreams." This is vintage Wanda Coleman, the poet of the people.
Coleman wrote as a witness. She captured her world and its truths, of life with the constants of race, fear, poverty, gender, inequality, oppression. Through it all, there is passionate love and sexuality, humor and drama - her work is full of startling confession and breathtaking power.
The Nation said of 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."
A college dropout living in Black Los Angeles, Coleman was disregarded by the establishment during her lifetime. It's time for her work to be discovered by readers everywhere.
Poet Terrance Hayes wrote, "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."
Coleman wrote as a witness. She captured her world and its truths, of life with the constants of race, fear, poverty, gender, inequality, oppression. Through it all, there is passionate love and sexuality, humor and drama - her work is full of startling confession and breathtaking power.
The Nation said of 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."
A college dropout living in Black Los Angeles, Coleman was disregarded by the establishment during her lifetime. It's time for her work to be discovered by readers everywhere.
Poet Terrance Hayes wrote, "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."
Reviews / Votes
The work of Wanda Coleman from Black Sparrow Press. "Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent."-The Washington PostWicked Enchantment: Selected Poems
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
"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
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Jaffrey, NH
United Kingdom
Publishing group
David R. Godine Publisher Inc
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 227 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
363 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-87685-896-7 (9780876858967)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Previous edition
Wanda Coleman
Hand Dance
Book
06/1993
Black Sparrow Press,U.S.
€47.18
No shipping information available
Person
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.