This is an anthology of irreverence and humor in the hands of our best poets. Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements. Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, ""Seriously Funny"" ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness. Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it. Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Toure said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of ""Seriously Funny"" hope its readers find much to share with others.

ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST--The New York Times and Washington Post A voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality--here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people's poet, Wanda Coleman. Coleman was a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of her poems, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes. Rejected by the elites during her lifetime, here's what people are saying now: --One of the year's best! "These poems are wildly fun and inventive . . . and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion."--New York Times --Winner, California Independent Bookseller Alliance 'Golden Poppy' Book Award 2020 --"Required Reading" Bustle --"One of the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A." The New Yorker --One of the year's best! "Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit."--Washington Post --"Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did."--Poetry A self-made writer from Black Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman made art while living every day with racism, poverty, violence. Her triumph is in words that endure. It's time for Coleman's courageous, impassioned, inspiring, one-of-a-kind voice to reach readers everywhere.

ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST-The New York Times and Washington Post A voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality-here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people's poet, Wanda Coleman. Coleman was a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of her poems, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes. Rejected by the elites during her lifetime, here's what people are saying now: -One of the year's best! "These poems are wildly fun and inventive . . . and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion."-New York Times -Winner, California Independent Bookseller Alliance 'Golden Poppy' Book Award 2020 -"Required Reading" Bustle -"One of the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A." The New Yorker -One of the year's best! "Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit."-Washington Post -"Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did."-Poetry A self-made writer from Black Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman made art while living every day with racism, poverty, violence. Her triumph is in words that endure. It's time for Coleman's courageous, impassioned, inspiring, one-of-a-kind voice to reach readers everywhere.

"Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit."-Washington Post "Terrifying and fearlessly inventive."-New York Times The 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. Wanda 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. Drawn from life's particulars, Coleman's art is timeless and universal. In "American Sonnet 61" she writes: reaching down into my griot bag of womanish wisdom and wily social commentary, i come up with bricks with which to either reconstruct the past or deconstruct a head.... from the infinite alphabet of afroblues intertwinings, i cull apocalyptic visions (the details and lovers entirely real) and articulate my voyage beyond that point where self disappears These 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": towards the cruel attentions of violent opiates as towards the fatal fickleness of artistic rain towards the locusts of social impotence itself i see myself thrown heart first into this ruin not for any crime but being This is a collection of electrifying truth that only an artist such as Wanda Coleman can deliver.

Coleman's courageous, impassioned voice, defiantly affirming itself in the face of social injustice and institutional dehumanization, rings out clearer than ever in her new book, Mercurochrome. So does her sensuous, vivid, tactile "verbal mandala": "love / as i live it seems more like mercurochrome / than anything else /i can conjure up. it looks so pretty and red, /and smells of a balmy / coolness when you uncap the little applicator. /but swab it on an / open sore and you nearly die under the stabbing / burn. recovery / leaves a vague tenderness...".

These high-energy, incandescent poems turn up the emotional thermostat, sizzling and shooting off sparks.

A selection of poems by the great american poetess Wanda Coleman, with calligraphy and layout by Jean-Jacques Tachdjian

'Essential reading' Roger Robinson 'Hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent' Mary Karr 'Sure, wise and devastating . . . a joy' Caleb Azumah Nelson 'Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent' Washington Post Nobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about making ends meet, about the history of the slave trade or the comedy of the daily grind, with the same breathtaking originality and brio; and few writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about their everyday experience of life - and love - in an unjust world. This is the first ever UK publication of the poetry of Wanda Coleman: a beat-up, broke and Black woman who wrote with defiance, humour and clarity about her life on the margins, and who went overlooked by the establishment for decades - even as she was known colloquially as 'the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles'. Wicked Enchantment gathers 130 of Coleman's poems in a selection by Terrance Hayes. Funny, angry, endlessly alive and written with an immediacy and frankness that captivate, here is the essential work of a poet of fierce resistance and self-belief against the odds.

The burnings from which Coleman culls her work casts a glow and unique warmth that invites the reader to sit by her metaphorical hearth, to laugh and enjoy their \u201cconversation.\u201d The contemplative and philosophical have entered her voice as she continues to explore the conflicts and confusions that shape the aesthetic terrain of Southern California and beyond-as she continues to grapple with cultural bias, malignant domestic neglect, poverty, and the damages of racism, yet broadening her palette of social ills to include the privacies of grief, loss and transcendence. A nominee and finalist for Poet Laureate of California, she continues to reflect the ethnic scramble of Los Angeles, where she has been honored by proclamations from the cityAEs elected officials, including the mayorAEs office, the city council and the Department of Cultural Affairs.