Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories 1968-1986

by Wanda Coleman

Heavy Daughter Blues was the first selected poetry and prose of Wanda Coleman written between 1968 and 1986 (now replaced by the more recent Black Sparrow edition, Wicked Selected Poems edited by Terrance Hayes.)
These poems and stories reflect the daily struggles of a poet-performer whose fight to survive is “plagued by the fear of not making it” (“Trying To Get In”). Poverty is an ever-present set of "claws” to grapple with, and in Coleman's realistically-apprehended present there’s no way to beat the Man at his own “it's high noon / the sheriff is an IBM executive / it shoots 120 words per secretary / i reach for the white-out / it's too fast for me / i'm blown to blazes” (“Job Hunter”).
Passion and desire yield insights, also “yes i do think of you / when i'm with him / even laugh out loud / remembering our summer's fun / how it might be fun again / still, something in his eyes / i do not see in yours” (“Four Men”).
Poet Wanda Coleman provides a how-to manual, revealing some immediate ways not only to “fix a bad man hex” or “do dirty better,” but to keep one's dream-light burning amid the aching rush of dark and anxious times.

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories

220 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1987

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

[Pachyderm Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavy, bluesy, and indicative of higher hopes for mothers, daughters, and other ladies inhabiting both the shadows of the waning day and waxing night.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let's not start with the spelling errors that are consistent enough that they can't be editorial mistakes. Let's not start with the subject matter, which wavers over the line of political polemic once too often. Let's not start with the scareligious procedure of putting lines above the poem that explain it. Instead, let's start with the definition of poetry itself and the basic idea, always there even if not stated, that one of the primary functions of poetry is to elevate the language in some way, that indefinable something that makes you realize a poem is a poem and not just random thoughts brokwn up into lines.

There are times, more times than can be coincidence, that Wanda Coleman's work strays over that line of language elevation. The woman obviously has a command of the language that she is capable of unfolding and wielding with scalpel-like precision when she wants to:

when god passed out the baby fat she was first in line she wasn't pretty [enough] to be a j.a.p. lost her virginity in the back seat of a cadillac her shrink diagnosed her as manic repressive

anorexia as goddess words so think you're hungry again an hour after you eat them

but unfortunately such moments are all too rare in this eighteen-year two-hundred-twenty page compendium of work. Most of it sounds more like it came from the freely-flowing pen of those too drunk, or too tired, to do anything but automatic writing. While there are some poets who worked at their best that way-- Desnos, Bukowski, and a handful of others come to mind-- the majority who try to do it fail miserably.

she walks walking walked all through life walks restless like her people waiting to see what happens knowing it will never happen until after she's dead

...and the walking shall continue until we can walk no more.

Now, I'm all too willing to kick a lot of swine out of the way to find a few pearls, but there are some things that will make it an annoying process, like an inability to spell "enough" and "come" correctly for two hundred twenty pages-- especially when your command and grasp of the English language is at least at the college level. By the time I got to the end of it, I was skimming pretty hard.