National Books Awards Poetry Finalist 2001

This book was published in 2001, back when I did not follow poetry awards. That was also in my Years of Little Reading due to having small kids. I heard about Coleman because my son read some of her poems in his California Literature class this year. The kids in the class had not been born when this book was published. And one of the poems (which I marked but lost because my cat pulls markers out of books) is about academics not accepting her into the academy as a self-taught poet without even a BA. She has made it into high scho0ol curriculum.

My favorite part of this book was Part II, Twentieth Century Nod-Out. These poems largely focus on life in LA--especially as a black woman in Los Angeles, like Coleman herself. In many ways little-to-nothing has changed.

In other ways, everything has changed since she wrote this book. Coleman had a son who died of AIDS at the age of 32, c1990 if I understood the poetry. There is a lot about grief and memory. And a fair amount about "the virus". It was strange reading this in 2021, when "the virus" means something very very different. Meanwhile, AIDS in the US is no longer the death sentence it once was.

I am not saying this book is dated. It is an amazing snapshot of a time and place, that has changed and also not changed at all. I imagine reading this back in 2001 was a very different experience--something else that is gone forever. ( )