Terrance Hayes

Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead "Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

A finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award Watch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018 In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes's background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes's award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

How to be Drawn

Investigates through verse how humans construct experience and combines the loftiness of dreams and the reality of everyday life into poetry that is both dark and buoyant.

Lighthead

A new collection of poetry from the award-winning author of Hip Logic reveals the role of tradition in art and culture, using the motif of the freedom of the wind trapped within the containment of the box to explore how identity is shaped by race, spirituality, and heritage. Original.

Wind in a Box

"A book of lectures by Terrance Hayes."--

A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight

To Float in the Space Between

At the First Clear Word -- emcee -- Touch -- The things-no-one-knows blues -- Ars poetica #789 -- Hip logic -- Sonnet -- Mr. T- --Shaft & the enchanted shoe factory or -- Ars poetica: The epic quest for language -- Squawk -- Butter -- Origin of the days -- Gospel of the two sisters / A Gram of &s -- abductor -- although -- ambulance -- apothecary -- beckoned -- bowling -- breathe -- careless -- carporal -- example / Conjure -- Friday poem -- For Paul Robeson -- Diego Rivera-Dama De Blanco, 1939 -- for Robert Hayden -- Broken dangerfield newby villanelle -- William H. Johnson -- Ode to Balthus -- "The Gulf Stream" / Four stories -- Sleeping woman -- Still music / A Gram of &s -- gander -- general -- masculine -- nuclear -- overseas -- preface -- repaid -- saintly -- segregate -- stupor -- toenails / The law of falling & cathing up -- Fire -- Gun/Woman/Son -- Heartthrob -- Mother to son -- Blues procession -- Florida -- The flame -- Ode to stone -- Alter call -- Autum -- The same city.

Hip Logic

“Dazzling . . . a verbal and visual feast that defies genres.” —The Washington Post From the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead, Terrance Hayes, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry—to be published simultaneously with his latest poetry collection, So to Speak Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. "If you don't see suffering's potential as art, will it remain suffering?" he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes's astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet's routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.

Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry

Watch Your Language

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead—to be published simultaneously with his latest work of literary criticism, Watch Your Language The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling. In “Watch Your Mouth,” a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds; in “Watch Your Step: The Kafka Virus,” a talking cat tells jokes in the Jim Crow South; in “Watch Your Head,“ green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and Bob Ross paints your portrait. On the one hand, these fabulous fables, American sonnets, quarantine quatrains, and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas animate what Toni Morrison called “the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race.” On the other hand, these urgent, personal poems contemplate fatherhood, history, and longing with remarkable openness and humanity. So To Speak is the mature, restless work of one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices.

So to Speak

The second collection of poetry from the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award Watch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018 Terrance Hayes is a dazzlingly original poet, interested in adventurous explorations of subject and form. His new work, Hip Logic, is full of poetic tributes to the likes of Paul Robeson, Big Bird, Balthus, and Mr. T, as well as poems based on the anagram principle of words within a word. Throughout, Hayes's verse dances in a kind of homemade music box, with notes that range from tender to erudite, associative to narrative, humorous to political. Hip Logic does much to capture the nuances of contemporary male African American identity and confirms Hayes's reputation as one of the most compelling new voices in American poetry.

Muscular Music

A reissuing of Muscular Music, the debut poetry collection by Terrance Hayes.

Douglas Kearney

D. S Marriott

John Pluecker

S. Erin Batiste

Mali Collins-White

Traci-Ann Wint-Hayles

Frank Wilderson III

Prathna Lor

Thematized on the status of the radical in contemporary thought, this issue features work by a diverse array of creative practitioners whose work explores this topic from the margins. IN THIS ISSUEArtwork by visual artists Regina Agu, Andrea Welton, Cosmo Whyte and Antoine Williams.Essays and poetry by emerging and established writers: S. Erin Batiste, Mali Collins-White, Terrance Hayes, Douglas Kearney, Prathna Lor, D.S. Marriott, John Pluecker, Traci-Ann Wint-Hayles, and Frank Wilderson III. Also in this issue: An interview with Erin Christovale (Assistant Curator, Hammer Museum) conducted by Editor-in-Chief Charisse Pearlina Weston, and Managing Editor, Linette Park.

Haunt Journal of Art

Terrance Hayes is a dazzlingly original poet, interested in adventurous explorations of subject and form. His new work, Hip Logic, is full of poetic tributes to the likes of Paul Robeson, Big Bird, Balthus, and Mr. T, as well as poems based on the anagram principle of words within a word. Throughout, Hayes's verse dances in a kind of homemade music box, with notes that range from tender to erudite, associative to narrative, humorous to political. Hip Logic does much to capture the nuances of contemporary male African American identity and confirms Hayes's reputation as one of the most compelling new voices in American poetry.

The poems in Terrance Hayes's book, Muscular Music, are atypical of most writers' first books of poetry. One cannot categorize these poems simply as confessional, narrative, or lyrical. They are all these things at once. They move beyond usual explorations of childhood or family to blend themes and influences that range from Neruda to Coltrane, Fat Albert to Orpheus, John Shaft to Gershwin. This book gives us an almost Whitmanesque account of an America, and an African American, replete with grace and imperfection. Moreover, it gives us a voice that does not sacrifice truth for music or music for accessibility. At the end of a poem that includes Bill Strayhorn, Andrew Carnegie, and Dante, Hayes says, I know one of the rings of hell is reserved for men who refuse to weep. So I let it come. And it does not move from me. These lines reflect what is always at the core of Hayes's poetry: a faithfulness, not to traditional forms or themes, but to heart and honesty. It is a core bounded by and cradled by a passion for the music in all things.

Poems and Stories Edited by Terrance Hayes

Ploughshares Winter 2010-2011

“Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air.” —NPR In these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation “as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself.” Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet’s search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America. The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories. There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father. My father must have kissed me when I was boy. I can’t really say. . . . By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen. My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache. Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; and three other award-winning poetry collections. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University y of Pittsburgh. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin will also be forthcoming in 2018.

“The cross-section of poets with varying poetics and styles gathered here is only one of the many admirable achievements of this volume.” —Claudia Rankine in the New York Times The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes. An array of writers—including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the National Book Award, as well as a couple of National Poets Laureate—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Danez Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, Richard Powers, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets. This second edition includes Golden Shovel poems by two winners and six runners-up from an international student poetry competition judged by Nora Brooks Blakely, Gwendolyn Brooks’s daughter. The poems by these eight talented high school students add to Ms. Brooks’s legacy and contribute to the depth and breadth of this anthology.

New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks

The Golden Shovel Anthology

David Lehman

Edited by the National Book Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes, the foremost annual anthology of contemporary American poetry returns: “A ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). The first book of poetry that Terrance Hayes ever bought was the 1990 edition of The Best American Poetry, edited by Jorie Graham. Hayes was then an undergrad at a small South Carolina college. He has since published four highly honored books of poetry, is a professor of poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, has appeared multiple times in the series, and is one of today’s most decorated poets. His brazen, restless poems capture the diversity of American culture with singular artistry, grappling with facile assumptions about identity and the complex repercussions of race history in this country. Always eagerly anticipated, the 2014 volume of The Best American Poetry begins with David Lehman’s “state-of-the-art” foreword followed by an inspired introduction from Terrance Hayes on his picks for the best American poems of the past year. Following the poems is the apparatus for which the series has won acclaim: notes from the poets about the writing of their poems.

Terrance Hayes

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