Heart First into this Ruin

The Complete American Sonnets

Wanda Coleman

• Verlag: Black Sparrow Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781574232547
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: American Poetry

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

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Praise for Wicked Enchantment
• Also by Wanda Coleman
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: This Is the City We’ve Come To
• American Sonnets
• American Sonnet
• American Sonnet 2
• American Sonnet 3
• American Sonnet 4
• American Sonnet 5
• American Sonnet 6
• American Sonnet 7
• American Sonnet 8
• American Sonnet 9
• American Sonnet 10
• American Sonnet 11
• American Sonnet 12
• American Sonnet 13
• American Sonnet 14
• American Sonnet 15
• American Sonnet 16
• American Sonnet 17
• American Sonnet 18
• American Sonnet 19
• American Sonnet 20
• American Sonnet 21
• American Sonnet 22
• American Sonnet 23
• American Sonnet 24
• American Sonnet 25
• American Sonnet 26
• American Sonnet 27
• American Sonnet 28
• American Sonnet 29
• American Sonnet 30
• American Sonnet 31
• American Sonnet 32
• American Sonnet 33
• American Sonnet 34
• American Sonnet 35
• American Sonnet 36
• American Sonnet 37
• American Sonnet 38
• American Sonnet 39
• American Sonnet 40
• American Sonnet 41
• American Sonnet 42
• American Sonnet 43
• American Sonnet 44
• American Sonnet 45
• American Sonnet 46
• American Sonnet 47
• American Sonnet 48
• American Sonnet 49
• American Sonnet 50
• American Sonnet 51
• American Sonnet 52
• American Sonnet 53
• American Sonnet 54
• American Sonnet 55
• American Sonnet 56
• American Sonnet 57
• American Sonnet 58
• American Sonnet 59
• American Sonnet 60
• American Sonnet 61
• American Sonnet 62
• American Sonnet 63
• American Sonnet 64
• American Sonnet 65
• American Sonnet 66
• American Sonnet 67
• American Sonnet 68
• American Sonnet 69
• American Sonnet 70
• American Sonnet 71
• American Sonnet 72
• American Sonnet 73
• American Sonnet 74
• American Sonnet 75
• American Sonnet 76
• American Sonnet 77
• American Sonnet 78
• American Sonnet 79
• American Sonnet 80
• American Sonnet 81
• American Sonnet 82
• American Sonnet 83
• American Sonnet 84
• American Sonnet 85
• American Sonnet 86
• American Sonnet 87
• American Sonnet 88
• American Sonnet 89
• American Sonnet 90
• American Sonnet 91
• American Sonnet 92
• American Sonnet 93
• American Sonnet 94
• American Sonnet 95
• American Sonnet 96
• American Sonnet 97
• American Sonnet 98
• American Sonnet 99
• American Sonnet 100
• Notes & Acknowledgements
• About the Author