Poems Seismic In Scene

A selection of poems by the great american poetess Wanda Coleman, with calligraphy and layout by Jean-Jacques Tachdjian

A series of poems by American poet Jimmy Santiago Baca in which he follows the course of a relationship between a man and a woman.

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. .

This is a collection of poems which attempts to map the Armenian soul, exploring the themes of identity, loss, redemption, dissolution, the world of the exile, the psychology of permanent derangement, human disassociation and the meaning of national identity.

Sometimes reflecting acceptance, sometimes full of anger, Gould filters her work through the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of a lesbian of Indian heritage. Over and over again, she speaks as an outsider looking in at the lives of others - through a doorway, out of a car window, or from the shambles of a broken relationship.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.