Jazz & Twelve O'clock Tales

by Coleman, Wanda

• ISBN13: 9781574232127
• ISBN10: 1574232126
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-01
• Publisher: David R Godine Pub

Summary

Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. With this collection of thirteen new short stories, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles's unofficial poet laureate, proves an exception to the rule yet again. The characters in these stories lead lonely lives full of longing, of potential stifled by racism, poverty, and absurd accidents of fate. And yet, even though they are trapped by the present moment, their inner lives are lush, a mirror of the city of angels in which they live, a metropolis, "always simmering," as Coleman writes in the final story, "ever waiting to be borne on that balmy promised crescendo." Coleman applies a poet's economy of words to her fiction, setting a scene with lightning-quick strokes, letting a detail, a dialogue, or the brisk vernacular speak for itself. .

Author Biography

Wanda Coleman - poet, storyteller and journalist - was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. She is the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was awarded the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Bathwater Wine and was a bronze-medal finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for Mercurochrome.

Table of Contents

Joy Ride	p. 1
Butterfly Meat	p. 4
Pepper	p. 7
Jazz at Twelve	p. 11
Winona's Choice	p. 21
Backcity Transit by Day	p. 53
Purgatory	p. 60
Shark Liver Oil	p. 73
My Brain's Too Tired to Think	p. 91
My Son, My Son	p. 123
Darkness	p. 133
Dunny	p. 137
Hibernation	p. 144
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