John Yau on Wanda Coleman's Wicked Enchantment

Another review of Wicked Enchantment, a selection of Wanda Coleman's poetry (Black Sparrow Press, edited by Terrance Hayes), is now up at Hyperallergic. John Yau notes that "[d]uring her lifetime, Coleman had been the first African American woman to receive the prestigious Lenore Marshall Award (1999) and was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Awards. She was still underground, but she was hardly invisible, which, in some sense, she became after her death, until the release of this new collection." More: 

Between that moment and this, Coleman’s work seems to have fallen out of favor with the literary establishment. In the years she was publishing (which started in her mid-30s, with 1979’s Mad Dog Black Lady), she was able to get a toehold in the American poetry world. Then, as both the white academic and the white avant-garde institutions would have it, she vanished. By my reckoning, 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 O’ Hara. The fact that they aren’t speaks to the continuing rifts in America’s segregated cultural history. Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka have passed muster, but Coleman hasn’t.

Wicked Enchantment should help set the record straight: Coleman is a great American poet whose best work serves as an instruction manual on inventiveness and originality after the authorities announced the death of the author and the rise of post-identity writing.

Continue reading at Hyperallergic.