American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Description

Written during the first 200 days of the Trump administration, a seventy-poem roller-coaster ride through politics, music, life and love The black poet would love to say his century began With Hughes or God forbid, Wheatley, but actually It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors, Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset Bridges & windows. In a second I'll tell you how little Writing rescues. So begins this astonishing, muscular sequence by one of America's best-selling and most acclaimed poets. Over seventy poems, each titled 'American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin' and shot through with the vernacular energy of popular culture, Terrance Hayes manoeuvres his way between touching domestic visions, stories of love, loss and creation, tributes to the fallen and blistering denunciations of the enemies of the good. American Sonnets builds a living picture of the whole self, and the whole human, even as it opens to the view the dividing lines of race, gender and political oppression which define the early 21st century. It is compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, bewildered - and unstoppably, rhythmically compelling, as few books can hope to be.

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind in a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.