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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9781574231533
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
Publication Date: 08-31-2001
Pages: 270
Product Dimensions: 5.91(w) x 8.96(h) x 0.84(d)
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.
Read an Excerpt
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
nothing comes to mind. i am dispersed on a page of ugly newsprint the faraway noise of a child's cry in the eleventh hour. i wait. it seems it
will take another five hundred years this side of Eden for shapelessness/to take form and fashion, i wait. and the darkness stains
my eyes as i read the fine print and footnotes, where is my history/the full blood minus bromides and falsities? who has
stamped happy faces over my sorrow and broken erratic prose? memory divides me against myself
without resolution. injunctions from the court of public opinion deny me access to the light.
my mother is plaintiff, her insurmountable rage imprisons my heart
guilty. yes. i am as guilty as ever
never having quite awakened from sleep indulging the molestations of The Sandman encouraging a perverse and deepening state of rimming, and having the nerve to walk and talk/somnambulate in my discourse
what details shall be revealed when the jailer sounds time to rise and shine?
imagination fails. all i see can be fondled or broken, the ridiculous mattress with its flesh-seeking springs, the thin itchy woolen blanket thrown to the concrete, the steel metal that tosses back my petulance
this stupid colorless uniform is cut to fit a woman with no ass
there are no clocks here. the notion of time's irrelevance is reinforced, spend your life for little-to-no compensation. (yes. guilty of nonconformity and the wickedness of high thought.)
settle into those mighty hips like a tablespoon into semisweet chocolate dessert
i am an outlaw, they assert. there's a ten-digit number stamped on my frontal lobe
i close my eyes to hear
joy. the terrible music of leaden wings i am a child and tremble as i climb the ether
on my last day of heaven, i abandoned her womb to claim my glory in her blood
there is no one here but me. from behind this glass i see the guard's station, prisoners are watched on TV monitors, a camera in each cell. if i move, i see the wisp of my movement on the monitor.
i am here through no fault of my own as a result of doing more for others than for myself, all the guards are men. they can watch me undress and make my toilet. they can watch me caress myself in my nightmares.
there is a pay phone in the prisoners' rec room that does not take coins, communication is futile at worst, faulty at best. i have learned that i am friendless. no one has sympathy for me. i have learned that misplaced trust can dismantle a life
as a result of this punishment, i have learned it pays to be more selfish with desire.
memory divides me against the light
the body with tracks. the body on track. body tracks
i am blackness waking my mother's face on my father's gift i am the utter meaning immeasurable, sensual and stark i am the jetflow of subterranean events my father's gentleness on my mother's savagery i am blackness, the awakening