So to Speak
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
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.
