His new book, a short volume of sonnets, 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 that propels that entire cycle forward ... These poems are acutely aware of the literary tradition Hayes works in, with as many references to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, to Derek Walcott and Langston Hughes, wrestling with the implications of blackness and literary tradition. Hayes’ inhabits the deeply troubling historical moment. But these poems are timeless.
Hayes innovates new poetic forms and hacks the codes of canonical containers, pimping them up dynamically ... His writing demonstrates a serious commitment to revising, extending and advancing American poetry while recording, celebrating and mourning black American life ... Hayes improvises voices and selves that challenge and attempt escape from virulent, American modes of masculinity.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, the new book by Terrance Hayes, has a claim to be among the first fully-fledged works to reckon with the presidency of Donald Trump — and one of the most surprising ... Each one is distinct: Some are sermons, some are swoons. They are acrid with tear gas, and they unravel with desire ... Hayes loves language; he loves the round vowel and crisp consonant. He loves to stuff a line full of sound ('the lunk, the chump, the hunk of plunder'), to write for the ear as well as the eye. His words call to be read aloud, to be tasted.
Hayes’s sonnets emerge out of a sense of peril, and the evasiveness and protectiveness it requires. He envies poets who have the luxury of wandering into all corners of American life ... There are formal and rhetorical puzzles in nearly every one of Hayes’s poems. Sometimes he uses sonnets to stump the reader...Alongside these gamelike poems are tributes to Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes, an appreciation of James Baldwin’s face, and the first #MeToo-era elegy I’ve ever read, working through the legacy of Derek Walcott. There are beautiful, personal poems about Hayes’s father and the consequences of being abandoned by him ... But Hayes isn’t describing canonical melancholy, the pined-for vision of mortality that poets sometimes indulge in. He fears a more immediate kind of danger, which can’t be aestheticized or glorified in verse. 'You are beautiful because of your sadness,' Hayes admits. And yet: 'You would be more beautiful without your fear.'
Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, seventy poems written in the first two-hundred days of the Trump presidency... honors the perennial efficacy of the historically European form of the sonnet (from the Italian sonetto, i.e. 'little song') while also challenging readers’ expectations for the form. Full of allusions to figures from Emmett Till to Maxine Waters, Aretha Franklin to Aeneas, every poem in the collection has the same title, and many of them contain an overt or implied address to the 'assassin,' someone who, in the past or future, would like to see Hayes’s speaker, a black man, killed ... Tonally dynamic and sonically pleasing, these poems insist there’s no difference between high and low diction/culture/art, especially when you’re writing for your life. Hayes spins the poetic form away from its more mannered origins so that it becomes raw, intense, and inclusive of many kinds of American Englishes. These poems feel as if they are written for both the page and performance. And each burns bright, as a 'house set aflame.'
There can be no question as to the timeliness of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes’s seventh book—it’s a collection of poems written during the first two hundred days of Donald Trump’s presidency ... Hayes too seems to be having fun, treating the writing... as a kind of play, although his subject matter is frequently devastating ... Hayes writes, 'This country is mine as much as an orphan’s house is his.' He could mean both America and the sonnet. Stuck in temporary, haunted, inhospitable housing, you might decide to have fun, to inhabit it as fully as possible for as long as you’re there.
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.
Pain and poignancy collide in this collection of 70 sonnets — all of them bearing the book’s title — spread across five sections of 14 sonnets each, a meta nod to the awareness and introspection the book aims to deliver. And deliver it does ... persuasively asks what room a “MAGA” world leaves for Blackness, for fatherhood, for freedom, and for the self ... For me, the sonnet is an old and storied, if not somewhat dry, form, but in Mr. Hayes’ hands it finds new agency ... In American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, this urgency is expressed through the finely honed wit, lyricism, and poetic prowess of Terrance Hayes.
These are sonnets, all right — but no poet in any other age could have written them like this ... Stringent but flexible, strong but not strained, Hayes' poems are crammed with passages that resound long after reading ... [American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin gives] us a singular, cherishable voice that commands music, history, and language.
Hayes uses a variety of approaches to take aim at the sins of the nation. He also employs surprising rhythms throughout, and in several poems, opens with the line 'there never was a black male hysteria,' which becomes a kind of refrain throughout the book’s five sections. Expect to be challenged on almost every page by a speaker who knows 'It is not enough/ to love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed,' and warns that 'You will never assassinate my ghosts.'
As a poetry editor, I receive a lot of poems about the presidency, many of which are stunning and urgent, but rarely do I see ones so direct as in this collection ... While there is still nuance in these poems, they speak to the president bluntly and without apology ... While these poems candidly condemn Trump, they are surprisingly playful and lyrical. The sonnet, which means 'little song,' proves a good form for this collection ... American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin does not just condemn oppression and hatred, it also makes space for celebrating joy.
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.
Unsurprisingly, Hayes masters this classical form, taking creative liberties with meter and rhyme to deliver unsettling incantations; hostile confrontations; and occasional love letters ... With this incomparable collection, Hayes joins others in taking on the sonnet, including Natasha Trethewey and Laurie Ann Guerrero, reinvigorating its form and reimagining the possibilities of American literature.
The poems are redolent of Hayes’s 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.
Written during the first 200 days of Trump’s administration, these meditations register righteous anger... But there's celebration, too ... 'In a second I’ll tell you how little/ Writing rescues,' says Hayes, but his rescues a lot.
