RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Hybrid and slippery as this book is — part memoir, part study of the poet’s own influences and ancestors, part meditation on poetics and selfhood — To Float in the Space Between is Hayes’s first full-length prose work, illustrated by sketches demonstrating the writer’s deft graphic skills ... To Float in the Space Between doesn’t show all Hayes’s powers, but it does transform the fast-twitch shift of his poems into a slower sense of drift. Reading To Float after Hayes’s poems feels akin to hearing Coltrane switch from \'Giant Steps\' (where he sometimes changes keys twice in one measure) to something like \'Flamenco Sketches\' (where he often remains in one scale for bar after bar after bar) ... A reader’s conversation with To Float will deepen the more he or she knows about the main figures Hayes claims as poet-fathers: Knight, Langston Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Christopher Gilbert. But even if you’ve never heard of these writers, Hayes’s readings function as apt introductions. It’s a gift to encounter writers through the precisely calibrated curiosity of a wide-open searcher like this ... Through such deeply felt and finely wrought eddies of narrative drift, To Float in the Space Between confronts the reader with many such moments of angular reflection and renewed recognition.\
