In the past two years, U-M professor Aaron Coleman released two poetry collections, which travel from the zoo to the wilderness.

His 2024 book, The Great Zoo, a translation of Nicolás Guillén’s El gran zoo (1967), shares Coleman’s English versions of the poems alongside the original Spanish. The 2025 book, Red Wilderness, spans generations of a family, from the Civil War to the present.

In The Great Zoo, Guillén and Coleman turn zoo residents into metaphors that perceive them well beyond rote notions of what they are. The poets possess an intimate knowledge of their subjects while keeping a level of removal in their unique descriptions of what lives within the exhibits. The zoo’s contents offer not only creatures but also items and phenomena, both naturally occurring and manmade, and as wide-ranging as a clock and a constellation.  

Coleman describes the book in his introduction:

Swerving from the hilarious to the harrowing, The Great Zoo explores an uncanny menagerie of ideas and social concerns. Each poem is a cage in this literary exhibit, and the animals we encounter range from the Mississippi and Amazon rivers, the North Star, clouds from different countries, and a hurricane to the KKK, the police, a guitar, and a dream.

This zoo is unlike any other a reader may have visited. Guillén, who lived from 1902 to 1989, was a writer and activist from Cuba. Coleman shares why he was drawn to Guillén’s poems in our following interview.

One poem holds the concept of “La Sed / The Thirst,” which, in Coleman’s translation, is a “Freshwater sponge, / the thirst. / It hopes for a river, devours it. / Absorbs a downpour.”  In “Las Nubes / The Clouds,” the reader finds “El Nubario. / Capacidad: 84 nubes.” or “The Cloud Sanctuary. / Capacity: 84 clouds.” One type of cloud is:

Larguilenguas de pájaro,
rojizas,
las matutinas
hechas al poco sueño labrador
y a las albas vacías.

Lanky-tongued like a bird,
reddish,
the daybreak clouds,
made by the farmer’s brief dreams
and hollow dawns.

One wonders what those dreams and dawns encompass.

Some inhabitants of the zoo are more tangible. The poet cautions, “Tranquilizarse. / Un tigre / real.” or “Please calm down. / This tiger / is real.” The zoo offers up menaces alongside marvels. During the walk through the zoo, the poem, “Bomba Atómica / Atomic Bomb,” warns that “It’s prohibited / to feed it. / Careful with the hands— / the eyes!” Placing such infamous items in cages can change what a viewer notices about them.

In Red Wilderness, we are no longer in a zoo but rather a vast landscape with themes of “national identity, Blackness, taboo, faith, and remembrance,” as the book cover describes. The poet starts out asking, “Who am I to say that I have seen too much / to trust another stranger? To learn to start over?” This collection considers this concern by going back to the Civil War era’s inhumanities and living through what happens next. One of the poems, “Life Inside the Clock,” illustrates this continuum:

                                     There
is a zeroed spirit wheeling in the air
like liquid glass thickening
between her gaze and where
I want her slow work to lead
you. To lead me. The eternal curve
in her back is the dark muscle
in mine. Her hands died
and became my hands. Her song
seethes and lights the burnished bones
that cage my mouth. I learned I had
her brother’s laugh—still
have. Distilled, always watching.

The poem deals with time in a meta way as we “Watch the ancestor watch / the kettle … / … / –the dream / seen from outside of it.” Moving forward means connecting across time.

In the poem “Late in the feature film,” Coleman asks, “How did I get here? Did I choose this for me?” These questions call back to an earlier poem, “The Bright River We Keep,” set in Homer, Louisiana, in 1927, according to the epigraph. This poem wonders, “What does carefulness do to love? / Where are courage and loss taking / us, and do I have a choice?” Later, in “Who hears another side of home?”:

                                      I watched love
change me. Generations from the late
night rust-red River Rouge foundry
to the early morning loading docks
of Eastern Market, broad black hands
loved and cursed and prayed, made
a living that made years that long
after made me long after they
left and didn’t leave.

Red Wilderness grapples with who a person is through time and in relationship with others.

Coleman and I corresponded about his two books following both of their releases. We talked about The Great Zoo and Red Wilderness individually and in relation to each other.

Q: What has this last year been like for you with two books being published?
A: It’s been busier than I could’ve imagined, ha, but it’s really been a wonder and an honor to shepherd these two books out into the world. There’s a sense of culmination, on one hand, given how many years it took to translate The Great Zoo and learn about the permissions process and connect with the great AfroCuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s estate and family. And Red Wilderness involved so much research into my own family’s history, along with travel to sites across the Great Migration that ultimately led my family to Michigan and Detroit. Then there was the whirlwind of the production process with the University of Chicago Press and Four Way Books as we prepared to launch both books. I’m so grateful for the skills and hard work of both their editorial and production teams!

But now that the books are in the world, it actually feels like another beginning. Traveling around the country to share the work at universities and bookstores and conferences is wonderful fuel to keep exploring the power of language, poetry, and translation. And the opportunity to see how this Zoo and this Wilderness interact has been so exciting, too. I think I’m still learning about how these works reverberate in the world and speak to each other. One day, not too long ago, walking along the Huron River, my partner helped me land on a brilliant insight when she said, "Both books are doing ancestral work." And that feels deeply true to me as I think about creative inheritances and legacies across the African diaspora.

Q: Let’s talk about The Great Zoo first. In your introduction to the book, you write, “Through the work of translation, we discover new ways of speaking our own languages: the imagination and craft of one writer finds new form in the imagination and craft of another.” Have you translated literary works prior to translating The Great Zoo, or was this your first foray into translation? What drew you to this particular book, El gran zoo, to translate?
A: I’m glad you highlighted that moment in my introduction because that insight was really born from my experiences living abroad in Spain and South Africa, where I learned so much about poetry from other traditions around the world. I’ve translated individual poems and short stories and even speeches for writers in the past, but this was my first book-length translation project. When I first came across El gran zoo, I was just blown away by the wildness of Guillén’s imagination: every poem in the book is an “animal” in a cage—but those “animals” include the Mississippi and Amazon rivers, clouds from around the world, the North Star, a teenage guitar, a dream, an atomic bomb, hunger and thirst, and a KKK that is starving to death. There’s a very, very dark humor that opens up space to think carefully about histories of colonialism, racism, and otherness in so many ways. 

As a poet, I was so impressed by how Guillén crafts images and how he constructed a poetic voice that tonally conveys that sense of dark humor. His poems are so different from my own that I wanted to translate them so as to dive deeper into their nuances and understand them better. But even more importantly, his imagination speaks to so many social issues we still face today. In the process of translation, I’ve grown my poetic voice in new ways by learning from his work, but I also hope that his creative and critical imagination is useful to broader conversations about oppression and colonialism in anglophone contexts around the world today.

Q: Your translation of The Great Zoo follows what you call a “the legacy of what I call ‘Afrodiasporic translation’ because I’m curious about translation’s role in priming us to look backward and forward at the same time.” How does Afrodiasporic translation influence your process as you translate?
A: I’m so grateful you brought up this term I’ve been developing, Afrodiasporic translation, because it’s something that emerged from my research during my MFA and Ph.D. studying the role of translation in the African diaspora. I started to dig into the history of Langston Hughes as a translator, and also the poet and so-called “elder statesman of the Harlem Renaissance,” James Weldon Johnson, who was a translator, too. I talk about this in my introduction and in some of my other work, but both of them seemed to use translation as a tool to help vivify connections across the African diaspora. Among their many projects, they both translated Afro-Cuban poets—and Guillén and Hughes were actually friends, both traveling to Spain as journalists during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

I’m interested in what poets and writers inherit from earlier generations, and I came up with this term "Afrodiasporic translation" to try to name this desire to build connections across the African diaspora by translating across sites of the African diaspora. Translation is a tool that helps us think about both similarity and difference as we get into the nuts and bolts of translation and strategize ways to bring a text into a different language, place, and time. It’s great fuel for me when I remember and recognize the many efforts of other poets that came before me as they tried to find ways to connect with Afrodescendant peoples around the world via translation. All around the world, we all need translation to help us see and respect the complexities of different languages and peoples and cultures.

Q: Let’s bring in your latest full-length collection, Red Wilderness. The previous question may relate in some ways. Poems in Red Wilderness also “look backward and forward.” Do the two books have similarities in how they deal with time? If yes, how so? How might poetry in general engage with time?  
A: I love this connection you’ve made about both books attempting to look backward and forward at the same time! I really feel that, too. I don’t think that the books necessarily deal with time in similar ways, but I do think that they, each in their own way, try to look toward the past in ways that unlock new possibilities for the future. Of course, the translation of The Great Zoo is actually bringing a book and a poetic voice from 1967 into our present moment and hopefully echoing into the future. But Red Wilderness looks backward and forward in time by first considering how we live with our family histories and national histories, then considering how we might learn to hold those stories in new ways and live with a complex sense of faith and grace and determination as we look toward the future.

One of the things I love most about poetry is how it asks us to pay careful attention to what we feel, what we see, what we hear, to everything we sense—including our imaginations. Poetry can slow down time in the way that an image or a certain turn of phrase can make us pause and think, or send us down memory lane; it can lead us to reconsider how we feel and how we see the world. Last spring, we hosted the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program. And during his public reading at UMMA’s Stern Auditorium, he mentioned that lyric poetry is an instrument of attention. I love how that phrase can lead us to think about the way that poetry can cultivate and enact a careful sense of attention. Poetry can bring us poignantly into the present moment; it can connect us with a different sense of presence. The energy of poetry and voice and story can help us let go of all the distractions and attune to the big questions about life and grief and love and community connection that matter so much to so many of us. 

Q: Both books cover shameful parts of history, such as crimes against humanity. They are also active in reframing this history. Toward the end of Red Wilderness, a line reads, “I was no idle wilderness.” What can we learn from the unique menagerie in The Great Zoo and the wilderness in Red Wilderness?
A: I’m grateful that you attuned to the ways both of these books engage painful histories of colonialism and racism and oppression of all kinds. There’s a sense of urgency and desire for human(e) connection in The Great Zoo and I hope that, in its own way, Red Wilderness has that desire for human(e) connection, too. But I think both books also do much more than that as The Great Zoo’s sense of dark humor still astounds me, and the aforementioned form of the book itself—wherein every poem is an animal in a cage—really built new rooms in my imagination. I just love the way Guillén’s book form is capacious and malleable enough that he can constellate all kinds of ideas and concerns in the book because each cage/poem is separate, even while they’re all in the zoo. I so deeply admire his creativity and how it reverberates in our present day. And, alongside the sorrow and pain in Red Wilderness, the book ultimately feels to me like it’s engaged in the process of cultivating community and building, out of the wilderness of our lives and the wilderness of our bloodlines, a determined and secreted away sense of hope.

As I’ve learned more about the history of Maroon communities throughout the Americas—places like The Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina; Palenques in the Hispanophone world; Marronage in the Francophone world; Quilombos in the Lusophone world—I’ve been increasingly interested in the ways that black people have carved out ways to live and survive even in unlivable circumstances. As dangerous and as wild as the wilderness is, it’s also a place of possibility, a place that can radically change the context for some of our most personal questions and hopes and fears and desires.

I hope the wilderness of this book allows readers to reframe some of the questions that matter most to them and to think about how to survive and build community in new ways. Of course, I want to respect the physical wilderness, but as a metaphor, I think wilderness can speak to the unknowable and the messiness of life, to the wild complexity of history and our bloodlines. Red Wilderness feels like my own personal reckoning with the wildernesses of my own life; I hope it also offers an expansive landscape and mindscape for readers to think about their own wildernesses, too.

Q: As both collections express unease with history and question choices, I am curious about the writing order. Did you write and translate them at the same time, or did one inform the other? In what sense do you see them speaking to each other?
A: It really felt like an organic process over the course of years as I worked on translations and did research on Nicolás Guillén and translation’s role in the African diaspora during my graduate studies. But I was also trying to write my own poems and trying to learn more about my family’s history as a way to hold onto myself during the challenges of the Ph.D., the academic job market, and all the struggles we’ve all faced in the years since the pandemic. My late Uncle Ricky took a lot of pride in delving into our family’s history and exploring genealogy, so many of our conversations and a road trip we took to visit our family in rural Pennsylvania in 2018 really sparked Red Wilderness.

Looking back at how both projects were coming into being around the same time, I do think some of the craft elements of the poems in each book started to rub off on each other. The process of learning how Guillén constructs concise images in his poems inevitably made me think about my own imagery differently. And Guillén’s musicality is just incredible—in The Great Zoo, it’s relatively more subtle than in his earlier books like West Indies, Ltd. or Elegias, but in all his work there’s just a potent sense of rhythm and momentum and how the music of language has a profound affective quality—we all know how important the music is to the momentum of emotions in movies, for example. I first came to poetry through sound and hip-hop, so I think I was definitely already a branch on his tree aesthetically, when it comes to the importance of sound in our work. But to return to your first question about having these books published within a year of each other: I’m definitely still thinking about the unconscious connection between the two books. The juxtaposition of a zoo and wilderness already creates an enigmatic sense of tension between the books, too.

Q: Red Wilderness features the 25th United States Colored Troops. When a reenactor shows the flag, “We look / at threads and hands, their eyes, the weapon, colors / billow and crack in the wind of another day.” The collection moves fluidly through history forward to more recent times. How do you see the three sections of the book interacting with each other? How did you decide to include photographs, some of which you took, in Red Wilderness?
A: Thanks for mentioning that you felt the book move fluidly through history forward to our present day, because the question of how to organize the poems in the book was both a daunting challenge and a one-of-a-kind opportunity. I often say to my students that organizing poems in a book is similar to organizing songs in a music album. There are questions of momentum and coherence and how to create a structure for dynamism, for emotional change. But the challenge with this book is that I wanted to enact that chronological movement from my ancestor who fought in the Civil War with the 25th United States Colored Troops, then through family histories during Reconstruction and the Great Migration, to the present day. And yet, I think only chronological poems would make for a kind of oversimplified narrative that doesn’t consider the way that our memories can boomerang through time and how moments in our personal history or our national history can call to mind all kinds of memories for us, however related or unrelated they may at first seem.

Your use of the word fluidity is great because I found myself thinking a lot about waves and how they come in and out, how tides swell and fall, and how waves ultimately return to the fullness and magnitude of the ocean. So I wanted to enact that dynamic sense of layering at an emotional level while still creating a trajectory that readers could hold onto. I hope the historical poems anchor the present-day poems and vice versa. And in the particular poem you mentioned, it really felt like history was colliding with the present in a dizzying way: I still can’t believe that, walking by Philadelphia’s City Hall in 2022, I ran into a Civil War reenactor who was carrying a replica of the flag of the military unit that my ancestor fought in during the Civil War—and that we were talking in front of a statue of Harriet Tubman just a few miles away from where my ancestor was discharged with his company in December 1865.

As another wild addendum to that story, I finished the manuscript of Red Wilderness in a hotel just a few blocks from Philadelphia’s City Hall in early 2024 while visiting the city for a conference. I walked around City Hall looking for Harriet Tubman’s statue and even asked some security guards about it. They said it’d been removed because it didn’t have the proper certification. So I’m even more glad that I got that photo and could include it in the book, along with a photo of the original flag of the 25th United States Colored Troops. It all feels like another example of the tempestuous trajectories of history, where memories rise up then slip back beneath the surface of our awareness. But, to me, even when we can’t quite see it, it’s still all part of the wilderness.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.

Aaron Coleman will read at Book Suey, 10345 Joseph Campau Avenue, Hamtramck, on Friday, March 20, at 7 pm.