Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales: Wanda Coleman

Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales:

New Stories

by Wanda Coleman

  • Format: Hardcover
  • ISBN: 978-1-57423-212-6
  • Pages: 160
  • Published: 2007
  • Wanda Coleman: winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2012 Shelley Memorial Award!

Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles’s unofficial poet laureate, proves with this collection of thirteen new short stories an exception to the rule yet again. Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales owes its title to the lyrics of “Lush Life” by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington’s right-hand man. Like the heartbroken lover in Strayhorn’s song, the characters in these stories lead lonely lives full of longing and 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. Or, alternatively, she will step in and take center stage, an omniscient voice seeing beyond the impending and inevitable tragedy, but powerless to change either narrative or outcome. Powerless, that is, only within the bounds of the story, for Coleman is an author devoted to change, personal and political, writing to affect the balance of power in America. “Nothing will satisfy me,” she has written, “short of an open society and social parity.”

Listen to the NPR review of Jazz & Twelve O’Clock Tales from “All Things Considered.”

Read a review of Jazz & Twelve O’Clock Tales at the San Francisco Gate.

Every story in Jazz and Twelve O’ Clock Tales conveys a fresh verbal improvisation, an unexpected lightness, and the sure understanding of the complexity of the world. Wanda Coleman is a poet and a musician.
Maryse Condé, author of The Story of the Cannibal Woman and Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat?

Wanda Coleman is a distinctive and original voice in American letters. I love the way that she can combine the poetic and the conversational modes, the delicate way she balances between the comic and the tragic, the sly, insinuating complexity that runs under the surface of seemingly straightforward situations. The stories in Jazz and Twelve O’ Clock Tales are inimitable creations—as is Wanda Coleman herself. She is a national treasure.
Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing

BOOK GROUP RESOURCES

  • Listen to Billy Strayhorn’s song “Lush Life,” from which Wanda Coleman drew the title for this book.
  • Take a look at the other Godine books by Wanda Coleman.

Wanda Coleman – poet, storyteller and journalist – was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. She is the recipient of grants from the Guggenheiim 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.

Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales


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