Mercurochrome

by Wanda Coleman

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.

Genres: Poetry

270 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2001

About the author

Coleman was born Wanda Evans, and grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles during the 1960s. She received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and the California Arts Council (in fiction and in poetry). She was the first C.O.L.A. literary fellow (Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, 2003). Her numerous honors included an Emmy in Daytime Drama writing, The 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize (for "Bathwater Wine"), and a nomination for the 2001 National Book Awards (for "Mercurochrome"). She was a finalist for California poet laureate (2005).

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mercurochrome, that stinging, bright red staining antibacterial stuff that used to paint kid's knees before the advent of painless Bactine and Neosporin… is an exact description of these poems, stinging, staining and healing--all at once. Wanda Coleman died last year, an outsized figure on the Los Angeles literary scene, published in beautiful editions by the venerable Black Sparrow Press… Big in laughter, glittering, roaring, tender, fierce… a huge hole was left when she went. We could use some of her Mercurochrome today.

Nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry, the poems are variegated as the human heart, treating love, motherhood, daughterhood, sisterhood, sex, racism, fury, loneliness, comedy as well as tragedy--often switching between them on the same page. She knew Los Angeles in its soul. Here's just an example of her art:

DISCONNECTIONS
1
I was not born. i was invented

stark & raving
relying heavily upon my cultural heritage
of poverty & bad grammar

my stumblings across the human landscape

(I didn't start out
to be an ink spot)

all my loves massacred (mother, 'no hawk's blood was e'er
so red') in an unseemly rush to dignity

my identity as a speaker of dreams
& ceremonies in dark cold thoughts

words like wild ponies freed to roam southwestern plains

sympathy reserved for the prophets, profligates
and pollyannas touting false positives

while my cruel & perverse sense of justice
incites riots of exoticism--broken minds, shattered fictions

living in a white sensibility
(there are no dirty sentences here)

blues (my deep sense of inexorable limitations)
expressed in my will to conquer
this nationally sanctioned villainy
spirited to the weary-witty last

i too have cried i am, but have gathered nothing
but a strange unforgiving silence.

[Dree · Rating 3 out of 5]

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, 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.

[Fiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Karen O · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a big book with about a zillion poems, so of course not all of them got to me, nor did I get some of them, but I love her language and gosh I love her fury.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a lot of good poems in this book. hell yeah. But the book is 270 pages long, so there are a lot (not nearly as many, but still a lot) of poems that fall short of the mark. The Retro Rogue Anthology section makes the book worth the read though!

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this poet!

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars.

[Todd Kalinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

you can't write or think or act or playact any better than that....