American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
By Terrance Hayes
By Terrance Hayes
By Terrance Hayes
By Terrance Hayes
Part of Penguin Poets
Part of Penguin Poets
-
$19.00
Jun 19, 2018 | ISBN 9780143133186
-
Jun 19, 2018 | ISBN 9780525504962
-
$19.00
Jun 19, 2018 | ISBN 9780143133186
-
Jun 19, 2018 | ISBN 9780525504962
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
Praise
âHayes 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 âall the black people Iâm tired of losing,â one narrator says.â â Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
âA 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 oneâs body fetishized as an object but criminalized as a force.â â Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
âThe right poetry collection for right now . . . Hayesâ 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.â âWalton Muyumba, The Los Angeles Times
âAmerican 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 . . . Hayesâ inhabits the deeply troubling historical moment. But these poems are timeless, by which I mean these sonnets annihilate any difference between past and future.â â Faraz Rizvi, The Millions
âHayes 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.â â Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
âOverwhelming 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.â â Hanif Abdurraqib, Poets and Writers
âYou will find all of [Hayesâs] 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.â â Kenyon Review
âA wild work, effervescent and despondent, Hayesâs collection of sonnets reminds us that the mastery of time is one of poetryâs important functions, though sonnets only buy it back in hasty fourteen-line bursts.â â Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, âThe Poetry I was Grateful for in 2018â
â[Hayes] speaks with urgency and authority, bearing witness to the absurdities and cruelties of the present moment . . . [American Sonnets] doesnât 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 powerâbut speaking it slant.â âTara McEvoy, The Guardian
âPain and poignancy collide in this collection of seventy sonnets . . . perhaps the takeaway of Mr. Hayesâ work here is that what lies in between is heart â 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 bookâs success. What more can one ask from poetry?â â Cameron Barnett, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
âHayes addresses this marvelous series of 70 free-verse sonnets to his potential assassin: a nameless, faceless embodiment of Americaâs penchant for racially motivated violence. The poems are redolent of his signature rhythmic artistry and wordplay . . . Inventive as ever, Hayes confronts Americaâs myriad ills with unflinching candor, while leaving space for love, humor, and hope.â â Publishers Weekly
âWith this incomparable collection, Hayes joins others in taking on the sonnet, reinvigorating its form and reimagining the possibilities of American literature.â â Booklist