Mercurochrome: New Poems
by Wanda Coleman
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A collection of poems by twentieth-century American poet Wanda Coleman.Tags
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National Books Awards Poetry Finalist 2001
This book was published in 2001, back when I did not follow poetry awards. That was also in my Years of Little Reading due to having small kids. I heard about Coleman because my son read some of her poems in his California Literature class this year. The kids in the class had not been born when this book was published. And one of the poems (which I marked but lost because my cat pulls markers out of books) is about academics not accepting her into the academy as a self-taught poet without even a BA. She has made it into high scho0ol curriculum.
My favorite part of this book was Part II, Twentieth Century Nod-Out. These poems largely focus on life in LA--especially as a black woman in Los Angeles, show more like Coleman herself. In many ways little-to-nothing has changed.
In other ways, everything has changed since she wrote this book. Coleman had a son who died of AIDS at the age of 32, c1990 if I understood the poetry. There is a lot about grief and memory. And a fair amount about "the virus". It was strange reading this in 2021, when "the virus" means something very very different. Meanwhile, AIDS in the US is no longer the death sentence it once was.
I am not saying this book is dated. It is an amazing snapshot of a time and place, that has changed and also not changed at all. I imagine reading this back in 2001 was a very different experience--something else that is gone forever. show less
This book was published in 2001, back when I did not follow poetry awards. That was also in my Years of Little Reading due to having small kids. I heard about Coleman because my son read some of her poems in his California Literature class this year. The kids in the class had not been born when this book was published. And one of the poems (which I marked but lost because my cat pulls markers out of books) is about academics not accepting her into the academy as a self-taught poet without even a BA. She has made it into high scho0ol curriculum.
My favorite part of this book was Part II, Twentieth Century Nod-Out. These poems largely focus on life in LA--especially as a black woman in Los Angeles, show more like Coleman herself. In many ways little-to-nothing has changed.
In other ways, everything has changed since she wrote this book. Coleman had a son who died of AIDS at the age of 32, c1990 if I understood the poetry. There is a lot about grief and memory. And a fair amount about "the virus". It was strange reading this in 2021, when "the virus" means something very very different. Meanwhile, AIDS in the US is no longer the death sentence it once was.
I am not saying this book is dated. It is an amazing snapshot of a time and place, that has changed and also not changed at all. I imagine reading this back in 2001 was a very different experience--something else that is gone forever. show less
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26+ Works 441 Members
Wanda Coleman was born in Los Angeles, California on November 13, 1946. She attended Los Angeles Valley College and California State Los Angeles but did not earn a degree. In the early 1970s, she embarked on a journalism career with an assignment from the Los Angeles Free Press to write about a fundraiser for Black Panther supporter Angela Davis. show more However, her sarcastic coverage caused consternation in the Davis camp, and she was blackballed by the underground paper for a decade. In 1975 she landed a job writing for the NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives and won a daytime Emmy for her work the following year. She took writing workshops around Los Angeles. Her first book of poetry, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, was published in 1977. During her lifetime, she wrote more than 20 books including Mad Dog, Black Lady; Imagoes; Heavy Daughter Blues; Mercurochrome; and The Riot Inside Me: More Trials and Tremors. She won the Lenore Marshall National Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1999 for Bathwater Wine. In 2012, she received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She died after a long illness on November 22, 2013 at the age of 67. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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