Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.
“Hayes set himself the challenge of writing political poems in the
guise of love poems. Each one is distinct: Some are
sermons, some are swoons. They are acrid with tear gas, and
they unravel with desire . . . These poems play with different
registers, but they return to lamentation, to annihilating grief
for ‘all the black people I’m tired of losing,’ one narrator says.”
– Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
“A diary of survival during a period when black men are in constant
danger . . . This is one of the deepest accounts I have read in
poetry of what it feels like to have one’s body fetishized as an
object but criminalized as a force.” – Dan Chiasson, The New
Yorker
“The right poetry collection for right now . . . Hayes’ writing
demonstrates a serious commitment to revising, extending, and
advancing American poetry while recording, celebrating, and
mourning black American life. These aesthetic and
intellectual preoccupations also charge American Sonnets.” –Walton
Muyumba, The Los Angeles Times
“American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is a gift in a
fraught moment. These sonnets, existential, political, personal,
retain a moral ferocity and urgency . . . Hayes’ inhabits the
deeply troubling historical moment. But these poems are
timeless, by which I mean these sonnets annihilate any difference
between past and future." – Faraz Rizvi, The Millions
“Hayes reinvigorates a classic form . . . [he] examines what it
means to be an American, to belong, and how it feels to be haunted
and hunted by violent racism . . . expect to be challenged on
nearly every page.” – Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
“Overwhelming in every sense. Overwhelming in its brilliance,
yes, but also overwhelming in its pacing, its style . . . The book,
despite its breadth and clever turns, is a confrontation . . . His
poems are like the slow and steady picking of a lock, until the
door handle clicks.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, Poets and Writers
"You will find all of [Hayes's] signature pleasures and
provocations in this new collection: dense lyricism, associative
word play, the political, the interpersonal, explorations and
interrogations of race and gender and sex and the body and violence
and power and history and time." – Kenyon Review
"A wild work, effervescent and despondent, Hayes’s collection of
sonnets reminds us that the mastery of time is one of poetry’s
important functions, though sonnets only buy it back in hasty
fourteen-line bursts.” – Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, "The
Poetry I was Grateful for in 2018"
“[Hayes] speaks with urgency and authority, bearing witness to the
absurdities and cruelties of the present moment . . . [American
Sonnets] doesn’t just combine style and substance; style becomes
substance . . . These poems reminded me what poetry is capable of:
of being revelatory and inscrutable all at once, of speaking truth
to power—but speaking it slant.” —Tara McEvoy, The Guardian
“Pain and poignancy collide in this collection of seventy sonnets .
. . perhaps the takeaway of Mr. Hayes’ work here is that what lies
in between is heart – a pounding of poems that stays in the chest
long after the pages are set down. These poems stay with me, they
linger, they poke and ask questions, and this is the book’s
success. What more can one ask from poetry?” – Cameron
Barnett, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Hayes addresses this marvelous series of 70 free-verse sonnets to
his potential assassin: a nameless, faceless embodiment of
America’s penchant for racially motivated violence. The poems are
redolent of his signature rhythmic artistry and wordplay . . .
Inventive as ever, Hayes confronts America’s myriad ills with
unflinching candor, while leaving space for love, humor, and hope.”
– Publishers Weekly
“With this incomparable collection, Hayes joins others in
taking on the sonnet, reinvigorating its form and reimagining the
possibilities of American literature.” – Booklist
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