{"product_id":"heart-first-into-this-ruin-the-complete-american-sonnets","title":"Heart First into this Ruin","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit.”—\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\n“Terrifying and fearlessly inventive.”—\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \n\nWanda 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDrawn from life’s particulars, Coleman’s art is timeless and universal. In “American Sonnet 61” she writes:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\nreaching down into my griot bag\u003cbr\u003e\nof womanish wisdom and wily\u003cbr\u003e\nsocial commentary, i come up with bricks\u003cbr\u003e\nwith which to either reconstruct\u003cbr\u003e\nthe past or deconstruct a head....\u003cbr\u003e\nfrom the infinite alphabet of afroblues\u003cbr\u003e\nintertwinings, i cull apocalyptic visions\u003cbr\u003e\n(the details and lovers entirely real)\u003cbr\u003e\nand articulate my voyage beyond that\u003cbr\u003e\npoint where self disappears\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\nThese 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”:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\ntowards the cruel attentions of violent opiates\u003cbr\u003e\nas towards the fatal fickleness of artistic rain\u003cbr\u003e\ntowards the locusts of social impotence itself\u003cbr\u003e\ni see myself thrown heart first into this ruin\u003cbr\u003e\nnot for any crime\u003cbr\u003e\nbut being\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is a collection of electrifying truth that only an artist such as Wanda Coleman can deliver. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"David R. Godine Publisher Inc","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53979742896472,"sku":null,"price":21.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781574232530_de85803b-35ad-4611-a528-f8aa2c14dd45.jpg?v=1750445143","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/heart-first-into-this-ruin-the-complete-american-sonnets","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}