an altar pulses open: some ancient bloodlove unfurlswhat breath remembers: my body of her body and allwe come from and come from and come from, howeach of us curves with the world, blown like a leafswells from its tree: green urge, earthdark, branchingseconds bend, browning. The flesh of wood forever fillsme with her sound of abundant rain: how the world sherounds reminds me what I would be if yes, ifyes: I trust the feeling pouring through the sound,pouring through as many openings in me as holesin our steel blue strainer: the family tool holds timeagain and again in hands beneath our kitchen sink, readyto caress the mesh: hold and let fall water. If Ilisten for my body living I hear who I am.
When I hear my mama sing
Aaron Coleman
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“When I hear my mama sing” from Red Wilderness © 2025 by Aaron Coleman. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
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Marcus Jackson
Marcus Jackson
Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, educator, and scholar of the African Diaspora. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Cave Canem, the Fulbright Program, and the American Literary Translators Association. His debut poetry collection, Threat Come Close, was the winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and his chapbook, St. Trigger, won the Button Poetry Prize. He is also the translator of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s 1967 collection, The Great Zoo, selected for the Phoenix Poet Series by University of Chicago Press. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Poetry Magazine. From Metro-Detroit, Coleman has lived and worked with youth in locations including Spain, South Africa, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kalamazoo. He is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
In defiance of life’s intractable march forward, Red Wilderness by Aaron Coleman (Winner of the 2020 GLCA New Writers Award) sounds the strange fathoms of the past, weaving a living song beyond what haunts our country and ourselves. Coleman’s second collection interpolates American history with his own family’s legacy, reflecting on national identity, Blackness, taboo, faith, and remembrance while enacting a multigenerational chorus of poems that stretches back to the Civil War.
"With linguistic precision and a tenderness that not only brings places, times, and people to life, but also demands that you, the reader, cares for them, Aaron Coleman offers us a massive achievement with Red Wilderness. Inventive, direct, and stunning in approach, its greatest achievement, to my eye, is the transportative nature of it. 'A black boy’s body is a language sculpted out of silence,' Coleman writes, and you might, perhaps, know the boy, or know the body, or know the silence, or know all three. For this, more than anything, Red Wilderness is an incredibly generous offering. One that will echo through my world for years to come."
—Hanif Abdurraqib
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