The story of a friendship from renowned poet, Wanda Coleman.

Wanda Coleman's novel traces the friendship of two women, one white, one black, one from the suburbs, one from the ghetto, but both aspiring writers, who for two decades share each other's troubles and triumphs in and out of work and love.

Wanda Coleman's powerful new novel chronicles the friendship between two women -- one from the black ghetto of Los Angeles, one from its white middle-class suburbs. Both are aspiring writers, both scramble to pay their bills by pickup jobs like waitressing and editing pulp magazines. For two decades they share each other's troubles and triumphs in and out of work and love. Coleman focuses primarily on the white protagonist's point of view; as the story unfolds and the character's roots are unearthed, however, we learn that there's no such thing as "pure" white -- only a mix of bloods concealed over time. As With Coleman's earlier books, Mambo Hips is alive with her patented emotional energy and lyric heat.

How do good girls go wrong?

Answer: It's not about the lips, it's all about the hips.

It sounded simple, even childish at first. But the subtext proved

metaphor for the sexual politics of a whole generation.

Hips. Loose hot heavy and swaying.

The kind some crave to be smothered under.

Blame it on those smoky-throated torchy red-hot mamas blistering

the radio waves of the day, "Hey, Paisano -- learn how to Mambo!

If you gonna be a square you ain'ttagonna go nowhere, " or "Com'

onna my house, ta my house com' on..." or that gold-throated

Johnny Ace throwing croon, "Flamingo, when the sun meets the

sea, won't you fly to my lover...." Blame the shame not on Mame,

but on the Fabulous Fifties. They were born there, if not then, and

the sugar-sweet dreams of who they wer to become were seeded

there.... Blame it on Chet Baker and Charles Mingus. Blame it on

Bobby Darin and James Brown. Most of all, blame it on those hot

neon California nights when the lonely hear the palms whisper in

their blood....

Praise for Wanda Coleman

Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (2020)"Wanda Coleman was a great poet, a real in-the-flesh, flesh-eating poet who also happened to be a real black woman. Amid a life of single motherhood, multiple marriages, and multiple jobs that included waitress, medical file clerk, and screenwriter, she made poems. She denounced boredom, cowardice, the status quo. Few poets of any stripe write with as much forthrightness about poverty, about literary ambition, about depression, about our violent, fragile passions." -Terrance Hayes

The Riot Inside Me: More Trial and Tremors (2005): "Coleman is best known for her 'warrior voice.' [But her] voice too can weep elegiac, summoning memories of childhood's neighborhoods - her South L.A.'s wild-frond palms, the smog-smear of pre-ecology consciousness. Her voice hits notes as desperate as Billie Holiday's tours of sorrow's more desolate stretches. But it can also land a wily punch line as solid as that of a stand-up comic."-Los Angeles Times

Mercurochrome (2001): "Wanda Coleman's poetry stings, stains, and ultimately helps heal wounds like the old-fashioned mercurochrome of her title. No easy remedy for the lacerating American concerns of racism and gender bias, Coleman's poetry transforms pain into empathy. . . these searing, soaring poems challenge us to repair the fractures of human difference, and feel what it is to be made whole again."-The National Book Award Poetry Judges 2001, Stanley Plumly, Chair

Bathwater Wine (1998): "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." -from the jury's citation for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Hand Dance (1993): "Coleman's poems are an act of liberation, meant to be experienced as something almost physical, like a punch or a whipping . . . she wants her language to express anger, to incite anger, and to shake all those who read it out of their complacency."-The Nation

b>African Sleeping Sickness (1990): "Coleman is one of the decade's most moral poets, showing us in feverishly focused first- and third-person dramatic monologues the grim life of L.A.'s streets. It's impossible to paraphrase her colloquial, dynamic style: where I live / the little gangsters diddy-bop through and pick up / young bitches and flirt with old ones, looking to / snatch somebody's purse or find their way into somebody's / snatch 'cause mama don't want them at home and papa / is a figment and them farms them farms them farms / they call schools, and mudflapped bushy-headed entities / swoop the avenue seeking death / it's the only thrill left / where I live Understanding does not mean, to Coleman, mild forgiveness, it means hot rage against those of any color who prey on others in pain. Contextualizing murder, rape, poverty, addiction showing us their human faces gives Coleman a 'shattered heart,' makes her feel 'thrown heart first into this ruin,' but the experience transforms the reader." -Booklist

War of Eyes (1988): "These are extraordinary stories, told in a powerful voice. This is the painful reality of the powerlessness that is too often shrouded in bureaucratic anonymity-a probation number, a welfare case number. Coleman, with her fine poet's eye and strong intense language, brings to life their somber existences."-Los Angeles Times Book Review, front page

Imagoes (1983): "Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music . . ."-Booklist