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:	9780822958338
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/19/2003
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Wanda Coleman  is a poet and writer from Los Angeles, California. Her numerous poetry collections include Mercurochrome: New Poems, nominated for the National Book Award; Bathwater Wine, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Ostinato Vamps. She is 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

I.	Red Noir
	Revenants	3
	Yellowed Parchment	4
	Nipples Like Thorns Piercing Thoughts	5
	Relocation on the Edge	6
	78 rpms on a Piper's Dream	7
	Wichita Down West Home	8
	Cold Meat & Three Empty Shells	9
	Lady Sings the Blues 1969	11
	Thirty Seconds over America	13
	Requiem for a Nest	14
	Almost Pregnant	15
	Meanwhile in San Francisco	17
	Art & Embellishment	18
	Cool Cats Snap Spats	19
	Things Go Sour	20
	Red Noir	22
	Red Eye & Black Beans	23
	Los Angeles Nocturne	24
II.	Ostinato Vamps
	Broken Rhythms	29
	Jazz Theory 101	30
	Dream Fever	31
	Ostinato Vamp	32
	Plum Hunger	33
	Soul Traveler	34
	Mahalia Jones	36
	The Boys of Loco Heights	37
	Fragments of an Essay	38
	Straight Out of Autumn	40
	Likes Tangerine Sushi	41
	A Second Death	42
	After the Rampage	43
	Designer Bag and All	44
	Translations from the Night	46
	The African beneath the American	48
	Faruk Yellow	49
	Revisiting Fear and Memphis	50
	White Wall Syndrome--A Study	51
	Lorde Cento	53
	The Woman in the Mirror	54
	Darwinian Ebb	56
III.	Two Fugues & a Prayer
	Night Widow Fugue	59
	Sorceress of Muntu	74
	Prayer for America Reborn	90
IV.	The Weighing of My Heart
	Fool's Progress	95
	Gone Exits	96
	Sour Apples	97
	The history of my body	98
	Slave Driven	99
	Olio Intaglio	100
	About Our Unborn	103
	Baptism	104
	The Museum of You	105
	The Weighing of My Heart	107
	Peace	111
	Passing through the Blood	112
	Exoteric	113
	Acknowledgments	115

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


"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

Coleman's last two explosive, masterful collections were Mercurochrome, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Bathwater Wine, which was awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Ostinato Vamps seems markedly less verbally dazzling; it is also angrier and more willing to state the case for poetry-as-documentary: "there's the necessity of music cut with bloody weeping." A poem that paints a grotesque, devastating portrait of a homeless woman ("scratchin'/ that tattoo above her crepe-paper/ titty...") nevertheless ends with a kind of redeeming prayer-"moonsparkle angelsleep...." Some of the work here is not electric enough to shock redemption out of despair, but nevertheless talks straight about "happiness that has a price / tag on it." The two longer poems ("Night Widow Fugue" and "Sorceress of Muntu") weave several voices and narratives and snippets of blues lyrics into rich fields of human struggle, and possess a soaring, lyric openness where, in the confident leaps and breathing spaces, hope and resistance to socially imposed fate begin to burn in the voices portrayed-and in a reader's caught mind. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the prestigious Lenore Marshall Prize in 1999 for Bathwater Wine, Coleman continues to prove herself one of the more innovative poets writing today. "Eternity ends where Hollywood begins," she states playfully, and in more politically charged play asks "how many African violets does it take/ to jump-start a heart?" If Coleman's love of language were not so apparent on every page, her major themes-birth and femininity, slavery and history-might well get lost in mundane polemics: we've heard this before but seldom with such lyrical grace. Her long poems-and there are several here-follow Charles Olson's famous dictum that every perception must lead directly or indirectly to the next perception, but what astounds is the clarity and uniqueness of her perceptions. No, she tells us, life is not easy, and there is certainly a lot of domestic disharmony in this book. But as she says in "Peace," a poem near the book's end, "and let the war all wars/ be fought on soft mattresses/ between legs and lovers." The demise of Black Sparrow Press necessitated Coleman's move to the University of Pittsburgh Press, but her politics might, if anything, be better served in this new context. Highly recommended.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal