The World Falls Away

by Wanda Coleman

Overview

The burnings from which Coleman culls her work casts a glow and unique warmth that invites the reader to sit by her metaphorical hearth, to laugh and enjoy their “conversation.” The contemplative and philosophical have entered her voice as she continues to explore the conflicts and confusions that shape the aesthetic terrain of Southern California and beyond—as she continues to grapple with cultural bias, malignant domestic neglect, poverty, and the damages of racism, yet broadening her palette of social ills to include the privacies of grief, loss and transcendence. A nominee and finalist for Poet Laureate of California, she continues to reflect the ethnic scramble of Los Angeles, where she has been honored by proclamations from the city’s elected officials, including the mayor’s office, the city council and the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822961642
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	09/18/2011
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(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.

Editorial Reviews

In The World Falls Away, Wanda Coleman’s poems glow with an almost radioactive edginess. Yet, there is also range and substance giving her intense American voice staying power. To use Whitman’s word, her work has ‘amplitude.’”
—Diane Wakoski

“Wanda Coleman’s hard-edged new collection interrogates death’s nearsightedness. Mother outlives son. Feet wear out before the heart. And the truth-teller dies before truth frees her. These poems don’t go gently. Elegy turns protest: ‘there is a never and there is a too late.’ These are sharp warnings from death’s ‘small mean domain,’ it’s not too late to heed them.”
—Douglas Kearney

“What strikes me first about The World Falls Away is Wanda Coleman’s musical inventiveness. These poems are sonically complex and technically riveting, Coleman’s lyric poems buzzing with energy, constantly shifting rhythms, and surprising wordplay.  But along with this musical dexterity comes a poetic mind of great subtlety. Whether Coleman meditates on her own life—her youth in LA, the heartbreaking death of her child—or, more broadly on music, history, or African American identity, she writes with clarity, wisdom, and piercing intelligence. This is an admirable book from start to finish.” 
—Kevin Prufer

“Coleman presents a series of subtle and revelatory poems in her new collection. . . . Coleman’s ability to simultaneously conjure the tactile and the abstract makes her works crackle with life and inspire multiple interpretation. . . . Coleman’s aching and meditative poetry gives voice to inquiries and echoes.”
—ALA Booklist

“Pulses with energy. This vibrant collection . . . offers some excellent poems.”
—Library Journal

From the Publisher

This new collection from Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize winner Coleman (Bathwater Wine) pulses with energy, and though the interesting topics range from jazz greats to explaining skin color to a grandchild, dark themes predominate: aging, racism, death, and the failures of the body. Coleman describes life's joys and sorrows ("call what I do a lope, a stagger, a trudge/ i'm moving, if slowly, upward—cloud by cloud") with accomplished wordsmithing, though many lines seem dashed off or hard to interpret ("this then is// the this then/ a rainbow of/ rhythms arcing the sky of perception"). She has a real feel for dialect ("jes' ain't effin' funnn"), but sometimes her word choices veer toward the comical: "I engage in scopings for mange-free strays to adopt." In the prose poem "A Mutant Angel Speaks," Coleman gives us an irreverent take on religion—"i cling to God/ with sticky hands. when he shakes, i shimmy. i say yeah, DaddyMan." Most touching are the poems that honor a dead son, "the long-limbed man child with palms to his knees." VERDICT This vibrant collection could have been winnowed but offers some excellent poems as Coleman "steal[s] words like bread like gold like bones."—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., IN

Library Journal