So To Speak
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling collection of poems from the T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Since the publication of his first book, Muscular Music, in 1999, Terrance Hayes has been one of America's most exciting and innovative poets, winning acclaim for his sly, twisting, jazzy poems, and his mastery of emotive, restless wordplay.
In So to Speak, his seventh collection, a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds, talking cats tell jokes in the Jim Crow South and a father addresses his daughter. In lyric fables, folk sonnets, quarantine quatrains and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas, Bob Ross paints your portrait, green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne and elegies for the late David Berman and George Floyd unfold amid the pandemic. These poems lyrically capture the often-incomprehensible predicaments of the present, as Hayes shapes music into language, and language into music.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Across three various and virtuosic sections, Hayes (American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin) examines the personal and public, from fatherhood to the murder of George Floyd, in his muscular and meditative seventh collection. With a masterful eye for image and description—"A wolf hungers because it cannot feel the good/ In its body. The people clap & gather round/ With fangs & smiles. The father lifts the son/ To his shoulders so the boy's harmonics hover/ Over varieties of affections, varieties of bodies/ With their backs to a firmament burning & opening"—Hayes's writing unfolds musically and dynamically. Many lines have an aphoristic intensity ("A god who claims to be on the side of good// but remains hidden is strange as the rules of grammar"), providing moments of sharp clarity within longer narratives. The collection's "American Sonnets" are richly allusive, engaging with "the tree of liberty," Octavia Butler, and Nelson Mandela: "He'd say, ‘Excuse me,' kind/ Even at two years old, then resume his supernatural story-/ Telling. Folks far & wide would go home laughing & crying." Hayes reinvents received forms, from the "Do-it-Yourself Sestina" to "A Ghazzalled Sentence After ‘My People... Hold On,' by Eddie Kendricks, and the Negro Act of 1740." These original, ruminative poems showcase one of the most rightly acclaimed poets writing today.
