RavePoets.org\"Terrance Hayes is probably the most innovative poet addressing the complexities of race in America today ... In all of his work, five poetry collections to date, he ferociously unearths the layers of racist thinking and its harmful effects, often using the poem’s form as his tool. And his new collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, is no exception. With its publication, Hayes joins a distinguished group of poets—among them, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ted Berrigan, John Berryman, Gerald Stern, and Natasha Trethewey—to successfully redress the sonnet for contemporary audiences.\
Frank Bidart
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe publication of Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965-2016 gives readers a chance to see how Bidart, ill content merely to 'say what happened' in prefab stanzas, performs a poetry of 'embodiment' first by adopting personas — most famously those of the necrophiliac murderer ... The scale of these poems is cinematic and their reach reveals the extent to which Bidart’s classical mind is adept at plucking allegorical tales and figures from Western literature and history on which he can graft his own life story, and also ours ... The danger of a career-encompassing volume like this one, especially for a career as prolific as Bidart’s has been, is that the greatest poems tend to overpower the minors. This is especially true in his later volumes, which conspicuously mark Bidart’s turn toward social and political issues like race relations or the poet’s own identity as a gay man. But even here, Bidart’s seething intellect and ruthless gaze register grace and wisdom ... Let’s pray his poems continue to aim at the most pressing issues. We need new examples of ways to be free, to slip the constraints of art and life.
