Wanda Coleman

Terrance Hayes

In this sure, wise and devastating collection, Coleman pushes against the limitations of language ... I cried many times while reading but also laughed enormously. What a joy of a book

Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of OPEN WATER

Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent

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

Wanda Coleman gives literary voice to thoughts on survival, as a Black woman who suffers economic, racist and misogynistic attack. Essential reading for all

Roger Robinson, author of A PORTABLE PARADISE

One of the greatest poets ever to come out of LA

Coleman is master of telling unvarnished truths - about self, about the world, about personal past and our collective future

Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did

Her works crackle with life ... aching and meditative

Sassy, funny, and wickedly sharp ... there are more than a dozen poems in Hayes's astute gathering that should be widely anthologized, certainly as much as any poem by Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, or [Frank] O'Hara ... Wicked Enchantment should help set the record straight: Coleman is a great American poet

Selected Poems

This is the first ever UK publication of the poetry of Wanda Coleman: a beat-up, broke Black woman who wrote with anger, humour and clarity about her life on the margins, and who went overlooked by the establishment for much of her career even as she was known colloquially as the 'unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles'. 
 
Nobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about poverty, about making do with what's on hand, about the slave trade or about their personal vendetta against slow walkers in the supermarket, in quite the same way. Wicked Enchantment gathers 130 of Coleman's best poems, spanning some four decades, in a selection by Terrance Hayes. Mary Karr has called it 'hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent'; the Washington Post says that 'Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent'; the New Yorker calls her 'one of the greatest poets ever to come out of L. A.' 
 
Brutal, hilarious, triumphant, wild and paradoxically, sometimes horrifically precise, these are not poems written for a course, for establishment approval or for polite applause; they were written because Coleman had to write what she saw and felt, and wrote brilliantly. Few if any writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about the daily experience of life in a racist world.

Wanda Coleman

Praise for Wicked Enchantment

In this sure, wise and devastating collection, Coleman pushes against the limitations of language ... I cried many times while reading but also laughed enormously. What a joy of a book

Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent

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

In this sure, wise and devastating collection, Coleman pushes against the limitations of language ... I cried many times while reading but also laughed enormously. What a joy of a book

Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent

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

In this sure, wise and devastating collection, Coleman pushes against the limitations of language ... I cried many times while reading but also laughed enormously. What a joy of a book

Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent

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

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