We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems
Product Description A voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality―here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people’s poet, Wanda Coleman. One of the most talked about literary collections of the year is this collection by a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity about her life on the margins.Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of her poems, 130 poems in all spanning four decades, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes. Rejected by the elites during her lifetime, here’s what people are saying now:―“Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent.” The Washington Post―“Hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent.” Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author―“One of the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A.” The New Yorker―“Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did.” Poetry―“Required Reading” BustleBrutal. Hilarious. Triumphant. These are not poems written for a college class, establishment approval, or polite applause; these poems were written because Ms. Coleman had to write what she saw and felt, and she 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. Review The world of Wanda Coleman from Black Sparrow Press Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems “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.” ―Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author“Coleman’s significance is unquestioned.”―Poetry Foundation“Wanda Coleman is a master of honesty. Her writing is an artifact of a life defined by brilliance, outspokenness, and survival.”―Courtney Taylor, SLICEMercurochrome“Wanda Coleman’s poetry stings, stains, and ultimately helps heal wounds like the old-fashioned mercurochrome of her title. No easy remedy for the lacerating American concerns of racism and gender bias, Coleman’s poetry transforms pain into empathy. . . these searing, soaring poems challenge us to repair the fractures of human difference, and feel what it is to be made whole again.”―The National Book Award Poetry Judges 2001, Stanley Plumly, ChairBathwater 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 . . .”―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 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, front page Review Latest praise f
