On July 25 Penguin released Terrance Hayes’s latest poetry book So to Speak. In it, he expands upon the American sonnet he so skillfully employed in American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin. In fact, an American sonnet that opens the book begins “Things got incredibly ugly quickly…” and another poem entitled “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin” imagines “our future dictator” as a child asleep while Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone sing. Many poets have tried to write about the immensely horrible moments of George Floyd’s murder, but Hayes gives us the best of our all our attempts at elegy. Innovative forms follow—a PechaKucha, a ghazal variation, a cento, a walk through paintings written in the imperative, a sonnet in which Octavia Butler stars in a movie called Octavia Butler, several DYI sestinas (illustrated no less!).“An Extended Public Service Announcement” and “The Kafka Virus Verses” frame the pandemic. Hayes also offers more intimately personal poems about family—raising children and being a child. In a long poem called “Taffeta,” Hayes writes his mother is “so happy she didn’t kill me when she found out/she was pregnant. She’s so glad she didn’t give me/to the old woman who asked to adopt me.” Hayes has done it once again—offering poems that truly feel like offerings.
Congratulations, Terrance!
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