Category Poetry

     The Riot Inside Me finds the author at the bloody crossroads where art and politics, the personal and the political, and Southern California and the wider world meet and trade blows before resuming their separate paths. The twenty-five items gathered here - a "hopscotch" of essays, memoirs, interviews, journal entries, letters, and reports - are divided into four sections. One collects intimate autobiographical pieces, including a moving portrait of her late first husband, a moth drawn to the flames of the more extreme forms of '60s radicalism. Another is reserved for polemics, mainly issues of Black, White, Brown, and Yellow. A third reprints Coleman's infamous "bad" review of Maya Angelou's A Song Flung Up to Heaven - "the most controversial piece I've written" - and a caustically funny report on its fallout. The book concludes with a group of essays on racial violence, poetry and the post-9/11 mindset, topical pieces that are sardonic when it comes to politics and groups but, like all of Coleman's writing, tender and hopeful when it comes to individuals.
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 The title of this collection is inspired by the ancient Chinese philosopher Shao Yung. The plum flower is the national flower of Taiwan, an island beloved by Weaver, where he spent some treasured time in a monastery. The collection is divided into sections titled Gold, Water, Wood, Fire, and Earth, which are the five elements of Chinese philosophy, and in that sequence, they comprise the creative path.
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