Wicked Enchantment

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.

MORE POETRY & PROSE BY WANDA COLEMAN FROM BLACK SPARROW PRESSHeart 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 GlobeMercurochrome“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 MagazineBathwater 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 PrizeHand 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 NationImagoes“Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music . . .”—BooklistNative 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 WeeklyThe 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 TimesWar 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