Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales: New Stories »

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. 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 of Strayhorn's song, 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. 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."

Publishers Weekly

The sharpest stories from Coleman, a 2001 National Book Award finalist in poetry for Mercurochrome, provide unsettlingly familiar portraits of lonely people attempting to negotiate difficult, mostly urban lives. Her characters torment each other, yield to socioeconomic pressures, talk wildly at times and never quite fit in. In "My Son, My Son," a cab driver picks up a woman on her way to meet her son at the airport, and the only certainties that can be gleaned from what she says and does are her wealth and her derangement. In "Purgatory," a woman puts herself in prison for reasons that remain ambiguous; the solitude offers her "time to do some deep exploration." Stylized phrasing threatens to carry off stories like "Jazz at Twelve," about a jazz musician who never gets proper recognition, or "Hibernation," a portrayal of a young woman ready for love but unable to find the right partner. "Backcity Transit by Day" is among the more abstractly painterly pieces, until its gruesome end. Coleman offers a set of searching, reflective voices moving from mellifluous to dramatically blunt. (0ct.)

Joy Ride 1

Butterfly Meat 4

Pepper 7

Jazz at Twelve 11

Winona's Choice 21

Backcity Transit by Day 53

Purgatory 60

Shark Liver Oil 73

My Brain's Too Tired to Think 91

My Son, My Son 123

Darkness 133

Dunny 137

Hibernation 144