Heart First Into This Ruin - by Wanda Coleman (Paperback)

About the Book

"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. "Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit."-Washington Post "Terrifying and fearlessly inventive."-New York Times 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 for anyone who values the power of words to name what is real and what is possible in a unique, questioning, and questing mind"--

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

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