"Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry" (Penguin Books, 2023) is a smorgasbord of Terrance Hayes poetic, artistic, and contemplative talents.

Hayes life, steeped in the arts, reverberates with a reverence for the written word, Black poets who paved his way, and passion for the poetic process.

Recommendations for (and biographies of) other poets, timelines of American poetry in the last 100 years, and contemplative questions about poetry are included. Additionally, the book is peppered with Hayes sketches, as well as diagrams to his poetry

Excellent as an introduction to Terrance Hayes, Black poetry, creative writing or for established fans of Hayes, "Watch Your Language" is also literary writing, and poetic exploration, at its all-engaging best.

Thanks to Penguin, Terrance Hayes, and Netgalley for my eARC!

This was excellent, a history and critique and prompts of almost 100 years of poetry and writing, I learned so much about writers I already loved and learned about writers I had never heard of. Terrance Hayes was previously only known to me as a poet and he is a great educator as well!~

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 19, 2023

Next week—on July 25th—Penguin will release Terrance Hayes’s Watch Your Language. The book is series of fantastic essays about the last century of American poetry. Including graphs, artwork, multiple choice quizzes, tarot cards, a boardgame, Hayes’s own poems for context, and biography framed by epistolatory gestures, Watch Your Language is a hybrid wonder. From personal experiences to poetry scholarship, Hayes makes timelines of poetry history and influence. Festooned in the book are biographies of poets (many Black), some iconic and some completely new to me, introduced by birth year as they would be in an encyclopedia. Of particular interest is his work on Gwendolyn Brooks and Wanda Coleman and their influence on him and poets of Hayes’s generation. Observations from his boyhood in South Carolina to a poetry conference in Shanghai right before Trump was elected (and Hayes would soon begin his American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin) to Cave Canem workshops, Hayes takes us on a journey of what it is like to be a Black American poet now. Embedded through the book are a series of 255 questions, such as “What if every day you ask questions of yourself in poetry?” and “Did you know Ezra Pound met Emmett Till’s father in prison?” and “Is Robert Lowell or Wallace Stevens the whitest poet in the canon?” Watch Your Language is inventive, thought-provoking, and pure joy.

Congratulations, Terrance!