Ostinato Vamps

by Wanda Coleman

Overview

Ostinato Vamps is Wanda Coleman's first book of poetry since the demise of her longtime publisher, Black Sparrow Press. It continues and enlarges the traits that have been her hallmark for more than three decades: a fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.


Linguistically daring, lyrically breathtaking, stylistically bold, these poems both explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes. Life is difficult, often unfair, but it belongs to the living, as Coleman reminds us in no uncertain terms. Racing between an earthy eroticism and fatalistic despair, filled with humor and tragedy, these poems are alive. They breathe. They challenge us even as they reward us for seeking the truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822979876
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/19/2003
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Wanda Coleman was a poet and writer from Los Angeles, California. Her numerous poetry collections included Mercurochrome: New Poems, nominated for the National Book Award; Bathwater Wine, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Ostinato Vamps; and The World Falls Away. She was the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Emmy Award as a writer for Days of Our Lives.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
I. Red Noir
Revenants
Yellowed Parchment
Nipples Like Thorns Piercing Thoughts
Relocation on the Edge
78 rpms on a Piper's Dream
Wichita Down West Home
Cold Meat & Three Empty Shells
Lady Sings the Blues 1969
Thirty Seconds over America
Requiem for a Nest
Almost Pregnant
Meanwhile in San Francisco
Art & Embellishment
Cool Cats Snap Spats
Things Go Sour
Red Noir
Red Eye & Black Beans
Los Angeles Nocturne
II. Ostinato Vamps
Broken Rhythms
Jazz Theory 101
Dream Fever
Ostinato Vamp
Plum Hunger
Soul Traveler
Mahalia Jones
The Boys of Loco Heights
Fragments of an Essay
Straight Out of Autumn
Likes Tangerine Sushi
A Second Death
After the Rampage
Designer Bag and All
Translations from the Night
The African beneath the American
Faruk Yellow
Revisiting Fear and Memphis
White Wall Syndrome—A Study
Lorde Cento
The Woman in the Mirror
Darwinian Ebb
III. Two Fugues & a Prayer
Night Widow Fugue
Sorceress of Muntu
Prayer for America Reborn
IV. The Weighing of My Heart
Fool's Progress
Gone Exits
Sour Apples
the history of my body
Slave Driven
Olio Intaglio
About Our Unborn
Baptism
The Museum of You
The Weighing of My Heart
Peace
Passing through the Blood
Exoteric
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

[Coleman] is best known for what has often been termed her 'warrior voice,' her inclination to impatiently peel away small talk's polite veneer, to scissor through to the heart of the matter. . . . [A] master of telling unvarnished truths—about self, about the world, about personal past and our collective future.

|Los Angeles Times

Adds a remarkably divergent voice to the richly multicultural strain of recent American poetry. A poet of tremendous range and verbal energy. . . . Coleman is a poet who courts disruptionas a way of making sense of a mind-boggling diversity of values.

West Branch

What astounds is the clarity and uniqueness of her perceptions. . . . The demise of Black Sparrow Press necessitated Coleman's move to the Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, but her politics might, if anything, be better served in this new context. Highly recommended.

Library Journal

A veritable atomic bomb of Brechtian-style 'verfremdung.' Ostinato Vamps is Coleman's most accessible and powerful work to date and my third-choice reading of the year.

Isthmus Books Quarterly

A sly observer, Coleman continues to shoplift language to address a gamut of psycho-social ills. . . . The inclusive and experimental quality of Coleman's voice characterizes a truly American aesthetic.

Black Issues Book Review

Something clearly reaches out from her poems to shake the reader awake. . . . Coleman's writing has a certain gusto. . . . She is [among] the best poets of today.

aalbc.com Rondall Brasher

Bejeweled with an optimism that can only be generated by the will, Wanda Coleman's Ostinato Vamps compels the reader to nod in agreement at the inevitable pessimism life produces, then turn on a dime as her lines rebel against such fate. . . . Arranges snapshots of life into a mural so heart-stoppingly profound, we must pause and catch our breath after reading each poem.

Home Planet News

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 (there are more than two of each) for two decades. . . . But her poems do not require an audible voice or physical presence: They perform themselves.

From the jury's citation for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

"[Coleman] is best known for what has often been termed her ‘warrior voice,’ her inclination to impatiently peel away small talk’s polite veneer, to scissor through to the heart of the matter. . . . [A] master of telling unvarnished truths—about self, about the world, about personal past and our collective future."
—Los Angeles Times


"A sly observer, Coleman continues to shoplift language to address a gamut of psycho-social ills. . . . The inclusive and experimental quality of Coleman’s voice characterizes a truly American aesthetic."
—Black Issues Book Review

“What astounds is the clarity and uniqueness of [Coleman's] perceptions. . . . Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal

“Adds a remarkably divergent voice to the richly multicultural strain of recent American poetry. A poet of tremendous range and verbal energy. . . . Coleman is a poet who courts disruptionas a way of making sense of a mind-boggling diversity of values.”

—West Branch

“A veritable atomic bomb of Brechtian-style ‘verfremdung.’  Ostinato Vamps is Coleman’s most accessible and powerful work to date and my third-choice reading of the year.”

—Isthmus Books Quarterly

From the Publisher