PositiveThe Sewanee Review\"One of the abiding images in this collection of nearly eighty sonnets is that of the black body, so often consumed, caricatured, and recycled by the American artistic and literary idiom it’s helped to create ... These serious little songs are colored by the racial and political context of our time, our anxious vacillation between online activism and lived apathy ... Absent any real formal variation, the book drags toward the end ... Still, there’s abundant craft on display throughout the collection, especially when Hayes attacks the political present ... With American Sonnets, Hayes has made agile and intelligent poetry of our culture’s facts, failures and potential, a painfully honest record of contemporary American life.\
