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Mercurochrome - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Mercurochrome

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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.

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)

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




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