Winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Coleman is a poet whose angry and extravagant music, so far beyond baroque, has been making itself heard across the divide between West Coast and East, establishment and margins, slams and seminars, across the too-American rift among races and genders, for two decades. She excels in public performance…but her poems do not require her physical presence: they perform themselves. -Marilyn Hacker, from the jury’s citation for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize