Ostinato Vamps

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 *

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 *

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.

* Rondall Brasher, aalbc.com *

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 *

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 *

Weighty with poems that defy characterization as much as they invite discussion, this raunchy but delacately provacative collection restores faith in the power and pleasure of the word. Employing dramatic lyric and extravagantly ornametal language, Coleman crafts a finely tuned dissonace, a brilliant cacophony that intoxicates as it disrupts. . . . Remarkably ambitious, the collection displays the depth of Coleman's responsiveness and the precision of her perception.

* Black Issues Book Review *

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