Mercurochrome: New Poems
"i am an outlaw, they assert./ there's a ten-digit number  stamped on my frontal lobe." This sprawling eleventh collection  of poems from the Los Angeles-based Coleman finds her  zig-zagging between continuations of series begun in American  Sonnets and the 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize-winning Bathwater  Wine, and grief-stricken ruminations written out of her son's  early death from cancer. Coleman, long a front-line voice in the  battle against America's seemingly endless supply of  institutionalized racism, sets her sights on store owners,  academicians, and the brands of social hypocrisy particular to  her home city: "the intellectuals are walking/ around with Boy  Scout knives/ buried in their brains/ while over three hundred  corpses a year/ are found rotting in Griffith Park." The six  sections of the book are sharply set off via subject matter,  with the dream-shaped, long-form meditations on consciousness in  "A Kingdom of Clouds" and the smoldering race-based critiques in  "Metaphysically Niggerish" especially strong. An eighty-one page  section of imitations and transliterations of poets from Ammons  to Zukofsky (using Mark Strand's anthology The Contemporary  American Poets as a source) serves as a different kind of  departure point, as Coleman creates dialogs with mostly White  poets through a close study and recasting of their own lines:  "The academy of the future has closed doors. / It is  unwilling books banned, curtains drawn." (after John Ashbery)  The book's length at times dilutes the poetry's overall power,  perhaps a by-product of Black Sparrow's insistence on long  manuscripts from its authors, but this is a minor complaint. In  her mid-fifties, with a formidable collection of work already  behind her, Coleman's emotional depth and battered, unwavering  search for private and public levels of justice continues to  expand. (Aug.)  Forecast: Coleman has long published her novels (including Mambo  Hips and Make Believe) short stories and many poetry collections  with Santa Barbara-based Black Sparrow. This book will be well  reviewed in the small-press community, and should generate  larger-press interest in a selected or collected.Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.