Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems

by Wanda Coleman, Terrance Hayes (Editor)

Overview

The time has never been better for this re-introduction of Wanda Coleman's work to a new audience of readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781574232349
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	08/27/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	247
Sales rank:	732,452
File size:	3 MB

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 was a bronze-medal finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for Mercurochrome. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is the first new collection of her work since her death in 2013.

Terrance Hayes (editor) is the author of Lighthead (National Book Award winner) and, most recently, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018)—both from Penguin Books. Hayes was awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 2014. Hayes served as the 2017-2018 poetry editor for New York Times Magazine, and was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014. Hayes lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Wanda in Her Own Words xiv

Mad Dog Black Lady

Wanda in Worryland 21

Doing Battle with the Wolf 22

They Came Knocking on My Door at 7 A.M. 25

Sessions 26

The Woman and Her Thang 28

Beaches. Why I Don't Care for Them 29

Imagoes

I Live for My Car 30

When My Time Comes 31

Doctor's Report 32

Giving Birth 33

My Love Brings Flowers 35

Felon 37

'Tis Morning Makes Mother a Killer 39

Imagoes 40

The Saturday Afternoon Blues 44

I Love the Dark 45

Heavy Daughter Blues

Male Order Catalogue 46

The Mountains/Entrails Curling Down and Out of the Hole in the Side 47

Essay on Language 48

Woman on Sand 50

Scratch Me 51

Standoff in East Hollywood 52

Wanda Why Aren't You Dead 53

Heavy Daughter Blues 54

Bottom Out Blues 55

African Sleeping Sickness

Ms. Pac Man 57

Bruno 58

Emmett Till 60

Auguries 64

African Sleeping Sickness 65

American Sonnet 68

The First Day of Spring 1985 69

How Does It Hurt 71

Dream 924 72

Nosomania 73

Notes of a Cultural Terrorist 75

Invitation to a Gunfighter 76

American Sonnet 2 77

Hand Dance

Hand Dance 78

Chair Affair 80

We Meet the Black Rimbaud 81

February 11th 1990 82

Aptitude Test 83

Essay on Language 2 85

To the other Wanda Coleman-with apologies 87

American Sonnet 3 88

American Sonnet 5 89

American Sonnet 6 90

Notes of a Cultural Terrorist 2 91

We could've made it if 93

American Sonnet 7 94

Essay on Language 3 95

Dream 1218 96

Want Ads 98

Neruda 99

Life as a Cartoon 100

For Me When I Am Myself 101

American Sonnet 9 109

Gone But Not Forgotten 110

Dream 1319 111

Soul Eyes 112

Nocturne 113

American Sonnets

American Sonnet 12 114

American Sonnet 15 115

American Sonnet 16 116

American Sonnet 18 117

American Sonnet 23 118

American Sonnet 24 119

Bathwater Wine

November's Song 120

Letter to My Older Sister 122

Things No One Knows 123

Two Times Baby 124

Letter to My Older Sister 2 125

American Sonnet 26 126

American Sonnet 34 127

American Sonnet 39 128

American Sonnet 43 129

American Sonnet 44 130

American Sonnet 49 131

American Sonnet 51 132

American Sonnet 54 133

American Sonnet 60 134

American Sonnet 61 135

American Sonnet 66 136

American Sonnet 70 137

American Sonnet 71 138

American Sonnet 75 139

American Sonnet 79 140

American Sonnet 82 141

American Sonnet 85 142

Essay on Language 5 143

I Imagine the Angels of Rage 144

Salvation Wax 145

Late Broadcast News 171

Etheridge 174

Jazz Whine 175

Life as a Cartoon 2 176

I Ain't Yo Earthmama 178

Pseudo Dickinsonian Cento Blues 181

I Ain't Yo Earthmama 2 182

Mercurochrome

Letter to My Older Sister 4 183

Zed Chronology 184

Essay on Language 6 185

Letter to My Older Sister 5 188

Twentieth Century Nod-Out 190

Twentieth Century Nod-Out 2 191

Against Forgetting Cento 192

American Sonnet 25 193

American Sonnet 88 194

American Sonnet 94 195

American Sonnet 95 196

American Sonnet 98 197

Thiefheart 198

Blind Cassandra 199

Hornets 200

Dream Song 811 202

Consciousness Raising Exercise 203

The Queen on Her Color 204

Black Alice Laments 206

Put Some Sex Sonnet 208

I Ain't Yo Earthmama 3 209

Supermarket Surfer 210

Obituary 211

Her Poem 212

My Bleak Visitation 213

Outside In 214

Having Lost My Son, I Confront the Wreckage 215

Letter to My Older Sister 6 216

Black-Handed Curse 217

Moon Cherries 218

Notes & Acknowledgements 221

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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

“Wanda Coleman’s peerless Wicked Enchantment has words to crack you open and heal you where it counts—hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent. All honor to her name.”—Mary Karr

“Among the most essential writers Los Angeles has produced.”—Los Angeles Times

“Coleman’s significance is unquestioned.”—Poetry Foundation

“Wanda Coleman is a master of honesty. Her writing is an artifact of a life defined by brilliance, outspokenness, and survival.”—Courtney Taylor, Slice

“A handsome volume that includes many of her terrifying and fearlessly inventive sonnets.”—Cathy Park Hong, 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

One of the Year’s Best—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Irish Times, and the California Independent Bookseller Alliance

Interviews

“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

Editorial Reviews

MORE POETRY & PROSE BY WANDA COLEMAN FROM BLACK SPARROW PRESS

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

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

From the Publisher