Reviewed for Library Journal:

"Across his career, Hayes has proven himself to be the rare poet capable of imbuing pronounced introspection into poems of grander historical, cultural, and philosophical incident with easy elegance. Following American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, easily the author’s most political work to date, Hayes’s latest returns to a more self-reflective space. That’s not to say Hayes is pulling punches—the poem “George Floyd” opens: “You can be a bother who dyes/ his hair Dennis Rodman blue/ in the face of the man kneeling in blue”—but the collection is animated by its variations. Hayes has always been a poet whose work feels unlimited in what it can contain, and here there are talking cats and dogs, Bob Ross and Lil Wayne, and magic goat’s milk. But there’s also an apparent melancholic vein that weaves through and around the playfulness of form and content, a clear-eyed reckoning with the weight and weariness of existence that powers the collection. Hayes recalls the “morning song” of pill bottles, laments that a scar can be “so old others must tell you how it was made, observes that “starting out we have no wounds to speak of / beyond the ways out parents expressed their love,” and wonders, “If you see life’s potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?” Read this collection on repeat.
VERDICT Quietly devastating and exquisitely wrought, these poems are among the very finest of Hayes’s career."

I honestly think that there is no other contemporary poet that’s poetry speaks to me as much as Terrance Hayes. This collection was touching and topical. Hayes has such a skill for writing poetry that anyone can read and relate to in some way. Great collection!

I love Terrance Hayes and their poetry and thsi was no exception, more wonderful and cutting sonnets and lots of other different forms of poetry

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 9, 2023

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!