Heart First into this Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets

by Wanda Coleman, Mahogany L. Browne (Introduction)

Overview

“Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit.”—Washington Post

“Terrifying and fearlessly inventive.”—New York Times

The first complete collection of Wanda Coleman’s original and inventive sonnets. Long regarded as among her finest work, these one hundred poems give voice to loving passions, social outrage, and hard-earned wisdom.

Wanda Coleman was a beat-up, broke Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and ruthless intelligence: “to know, i must survive myself,” she wrote in “American Sonnet 7.” A poet of the people, she created the experimental “American Sonnet” form and published them between 1986 and 2001. The form inspired countless others, from Terrance Hayes to Billy Collins.

Drawn from life’s particulars, Coleman’s art is timeless and universal. In “American Sonnet 61” she writes:

reaching down into my griot bag
of womanish wisdom and wily
social commentary, i come up with bricks
with which to either reconstruct
the past or deconstruct a head....
from the infinite alphabet of afroblues
intertwinings, i cull apocalyptic visions
(the details and lovers entirely real)
and articulate my voyage beyond that
point where self disappears

These one hundred sonnets—borne from influences as diverse as Huey P. Newton and Herman Melville, Amiri Baraka and Robert Duncan—tell Coleman’s own tale, as well as the story of Black and white America. From “American Sonnet 2”:

towards the cruel attentions of violent opiates
as towards the fatal fickleness of artistic rain
towards the locusts of social impotence itself
i see myself thrown heart first into this ruin
not for any crime
but being

This is a collection of electrifying truth that only an artist such as Wanda Coleman can deliver.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781574232530
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	1,089,239
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Wanda Coleman—poet, storyteller and journalist—was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. Coleman was awarded the prestigious 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Bathwater Wine from the American Academy of Poets, becoming the first African-American woman to ever win the prize, and Mercurochrome was a bronze-medal finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems was the first new collection of her work since her death in 2013.

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer, and educator. She served as the Lincoln Center’s first ever poet in residence, and works as the executive director of JustMedia, a media literacy initiative designed to support the groundwork of criminal justice leaders and community members. Her books include Black Girl Magic, Chlorine Sky, Vinyl Moon, Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, and I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love, a poetry collection responding to the impact of mass incarceration on women and children. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/18/2022

In this essential collection of Coleman's signature "American Sonnets," critical poise and dazzling imagery are on resounding display. Coleman throws herself "heart first into this ruin": the ruin of America, of love, and of the body. Relentlessly reinventing the inherited sonnet form, her poems offer a critique of "creative capitalism," "brutal powers," and "this sham world." Each dizzies with imagination and her ever-present wit: "i cannot swim/ and i have been refused a mae west." Jostling between centuries-old language and the intimacy of the colloquial, Coleman becomes a kind of "rebel angel," fully invested in desire and what stands in the way of the heart. A poem after Robert Duncan admits, "o memory. i sweat the eternal weight of graves," while other sonnets ask "toward what" our society travels, and argue against "the killer humdrum of life without fulfillment." Transcending and outlasting eras, Coleman's incisive poems sing out against long-standing inequalities. This complete edition offers an indispensable look at one of the most important and surprising voices in American poetry. (June)

Publishers Weekly

MORE POETRY & PROSE BY WANDA COLEMAN FROM BLACK SPARROW PRESS

Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems

One of the Year’s Best—
The New York Times and The Washington Post

“These poems are wildly fun and inventive . . . and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion.”
—New York Times

“Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit.”
—Washington Post

“Wanda Coleman’s work has that ineffable quality that accompanies poetry you understand in your belly and your head....You get the jazz, the soul and also the idiosyncrasy. It is an unmistakable style that propels a Coleman poem, and draws us into it.”
—Reginald Dwayne Betts, New York Times

“Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did.”
—Poetry

“One of the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A.”
—The New Yorker

“Required Reading”
—Bustle

Mercurochrome

“In the decade since her death, Coleman’s greatness is gaining widespread recognition….Her radicalness here is not one of formal experimentation but of accountability for her damaged yet resilient psyche as a child born in 1946, during Jim Crow segregation. She gives voice to that which might otherwise remain unspoken.”
— Adam Bradley, New York Times’ T Magazine

Bathwater Wine

“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

“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

Imagoes

“Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music . . .”
—Booklist

Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors

“Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable.”
—Publisher's Weekly

The Riot Inside Me: More Trial and Tremors

“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

War of Eyes

“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

Praise for Heart First into this Ruin

“Essential....one of the most important and surprising voices in American poetry.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Wanda Coleman, who died at the age of 67 in 2013, may be one of America’s best sonneteers but she was never celebrated as such during her lifetime because she didn’t play nice. Coleman was dismissed as too angry, too despairing, too contradictory, too unruly and too Black. As a single mother who grew up in Watts, Coleman was too honest about the failures of this nation’s deep-rooted racism at a time when editors wanted Black poetry sandpapered down for white readers.”
—Cathy Park Hong, The New York Times

“Poems of force and wisdom.”
—Boston Globe

From the Publisher