A War of Eyes: And Other Stories

by Wanda Coleman

Overview

The lives of the urban desperate in their unending struggle to keep afloat in an always dangerous environment circumscribed by racism and poverty. “Extraordinary stories, told in a powerful voice.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Wanda Coleman wrote as a witness, whether as a poet, in fiction, or journalism. She captured her world and its truths, of life with the constants of race, fear, poverty, gender, inequality, oppression. Through it all, there is passionate love and sexuality, humor and drama — her work is full of startling confession and breathtaking power.

Terrance Hayes wrote, “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.”

War of Eyes is for anyone who loves powerful fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780876857359
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	07/01/1988
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.73(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.

Editorial Reviews

The work of Wanda Coleman from Black Sparrow Press. “Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent.”—The Washington Post

Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems

One of the year’s best— The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the California Independent Bookseller Alliance

“These poems are wildly fun and inventive . . . and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion.”—New York Times

“Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit.”—Washington Post

“Wanda Coleman’s peerless Wicked Enchantment has words to crack you open and heal you where it counts—hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent.”—Mary Karr

Required Reading—Bustle

“As a poet, mother, Los Angeles native, black woman, essayist, and more, Wanda Coleman is a master of honesty. Her writing is an artifact of a life defined by brilliance, outspokenness, and survival.”—Slice

Mercurochrome

“Wanda Coleman’s poetry stings, stains, and ultimately helps heal wounds like the old-fashioned mercurochrome of her title. No easy remedy for the lacerating American concerns of racism and gender bias, Coleman’s poetry transforms pain into empathy. . . these searing, soaring poems challenge us to repair the fractures of human difference, and feel what it is to be made whole again.”—The National Book Award Poetry Judges 2001, Stanley Plumly, Chair

Bathwater Wine

“A poet whose angry and extravagant music, so far beyond baroque, has been making itself heard across the divide between West Coast and East, establishment and margins, slams and seminars, across the too-American rift among races and genders.” —from the jury's citation for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Hand Dance

“Coleman’s poems are an act of liberation, meant to be experienced as something almost physical, like a punch or a whipping . . . she wants her language to express anger, to incite anger, and to shake all those who read it out of their complacency.”—The Nation

Imagoes

“Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music . . .”—Booklist

Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors

“Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable.” —Publisher's Weekly

The Riot Inside Me: More Trial and Tremors

“Coleman is best known for her ‘warrior voice.’ [But her] voice too can weep elegiac, summoning memories of childhood’s neighborhoods – her South L.A.’s wild-frond palms, the smog-smear of pre-ecology consciousness. Her voice hits notes as desperate as Billie Holiday’s tours of sorrow’s more desolate stretches. But it can also land a wily punch line as solid as that of a stand-up comic.”—Los Angeles Times

War of Eyes

“These are extraordinary stories, told in a powerful voice. This is the painful reality of the powerlessness that is too often shrouded in bureaucratic anonymity—a probation number, a welfare case number. Coleman, with her fine poet’s eye and strong intense language, brings to life their somber existences.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review, front page

From the Publisher

Coleman ( Heavy Daughter Blues, etc.) pens knowing tales of the black urban poor, describing hardworking waitresses looking for a way out, a man who literally starves himself to death supporting a luxury car, and a future world where the lower classes must pay the government or be executed. Her best pieces, such as ``Dream 5281,'' about a group of women accosted by toughs, and ``The Big Little Gang,'' concerning underage criminals, are distinguished by smooth plotting, effective suspense and deft characterization. The title story, a psychological fantasy, is both striking and elegant, while the delightful ``Take It Up at the Bridge'' succeeds as a jazz riff in words. All too often, however, the narration waxes amateurish and stilted, the action is jarring and the principals fail to ring true. An egregious example is ``Reba,'' in which the heroine's odd behavior is explained by the revelation that she has eaten her baby. A more restrained editorial focus would have resulted in a slimmer volume and a better showcase for Coleman's talents. (August)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly