Staff Pick
Terrance is back; rejoice! His American sonnets punch and flex and bend in all the right places, taking on issues dear to him and making them dear to anyone who calls themselves an American. Recommended By Jake A., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Finalist for the 2018 National Book 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.
Review
"The right poetry collection for right now....Hayes' writing demonstrates a serious commitment to revising, extending, and advancing American poetry while recording, celebrating, and mourning black American life. These aesthetic and intellectual preoccupations also charge American Sonnets." Walton Muyumba, The Los Angeles Times
Review
"A diary of survival during a period when black men are in constant danger....This is one of the deepest accounts I have read in poetry of what it feels like to have one's body fetishized as an object but criminalized as a force." Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
Review
"[Hayes] speaks with urgency and authority, bearing witness to the absurdities and cruelties of the present moment....[American Sonnets] doesn't just combine style and substance; style becomes substance....These poems reminded me what poetry is capable of: of being revelatory and inscrutable all at once, of speaking truth to power — but speaking it slant." Tara McEvoy, The Guardian
About the Author
Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.