{"product_id":"heart-first-into-this-ruin-the-complete-american-sonnets","title":"Heart First Into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets","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 \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"Terrifying and fearlessly inventive.\"--\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWanda 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDrawn from life's particulars, Coleman's art is timeless and universal. In \"American Sonnet 61\" she writes: \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ereaching down into my griot bag \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eof womanish wisdom and wily \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003esocial commentary, i come up with bricks \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ewith which to either reconstruct \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ethe past or deconstruct a head.... \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003efrom the infinite alphabet of afroblues \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eintertwinings, i cull apocalyptic visions \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e(the details and lovers entirely real) \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eand articulate my voyage beyond that \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003epoint where self disappears \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThese 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\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003etowards the cruel attentions of violent opiates \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eas towards the fatal fickleness of artistic rain \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003etowards the locusts of social impotence itself \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ei see myself thrown heart first into this ruin \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003enot for any crime \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ebut being \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis is a collection of electrifying truth that only an artist such as Wanda Coleman can deliver. ","brand":"Black Sparrow Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47049113960684,"sku":"9781574232530","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/2987\/3644\/files\/imageloader_9780b8bb-e55c-40d4-adcd-bc541c13a493.jpg?v=1764624044","url":"https:\/\/www.gladysbooksandwine.com\/products\/heart-first-into-this-ruin-the-complete-american-sonnets","provider":"Gladys Books \u0026 Wine","version":"1.0","type":"link"}