{"product_id":"heart-first-into-this-ruin-by-wanda-coleman-9781574232530","title":"Heart First into this Ruin","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\"Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging... potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit.\"\u003c\/em\u003e -\u003cem\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\"Terrifying and fearlessly inventive.\"\u003c\/em\u003e -\u003cem\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWanda Coleman was a beat-up, broke Black woman who wrote with anger, humour, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDrawn from life's particulars, Coleman's art is timeless and universal. In \"American Sonnet 61\" she writes:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ereaching down into my griot bag\u003cbr\u003e of womanish wisdom and wily\u003cbr\u003e social commentary, i come up with bricks\u003cbr\u003e with which to either reconstruct\u003cbr\u003e the past or deconstruct a head....\u003cbr\u003e from the infinite alphabet of afroblues\u003cbr\u003e intertwinings, i cull apocalyptic visions\u003cbr\u003e (the details and lovers entirely real)\u003cbr\u003e and articulate my voyage beyond that\u003cbr\u003e point where self disappears\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\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\":\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003etowards the cruel attentions of violent opiates\u003cbr\u003e as towards the fatal fickleness of artistic rain\u003cbr\u003e towards the locusts of social impotence itself\u003cbr\u003e i see myself thrown heart first into this ruin\u003cbr\u003e not for any crime\u003cbr\u003e but being\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a collection of electrifying truth that only an artist such as Wanda Coleman can deliver.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47455583240428,"sku":"9781574232530","price":34.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/b19730e08502a9a091127a2a78f14924.jpg?v=1774817755","url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/products\/heart-first-into-this-ruin-by-wanda-coleman-9781574232530","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}