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

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