American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

"American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, by Terrance Hayes, is a master class in the form."

"I’ve read that in this book he’s addressing the first period, day by day, of Trump’s presidency, so they are very much current. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin interrogates issues of race, gender, sexuality and politics in America. There are really a hundred ways in which, despite having the ‘right’ ideas, a poem can go wrong. But the energy, agility and invention of Hayes’s work guards against most of them, and emphatically win the reader over. He’s as unafraid to tackle whatever comes his way as he is to grapple with the formal history of these sonnets. They’re vivid, unrhymed fourteen-liners. “There are really a hundred ways in which, despite having the ‘right’ ideas, a poem can go wrong. But the energy, agility and invention of Hayes’s work guards against most of them” Are they ‘American Sonnets’ because of their subject matter, or their form? I wouldn’t consider the unrhymed form especially ‘American’, but the allusion may have to do with other forebears such as Rita Dove’s Mother Love or Lowell’s History . By comparison, Lowell sounds heavy and armour-plated. What comes over in Hayes is an attraction and a resistance to the form, or as one poem puts it: I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat Grinder where any reassurance of the contained form is set against images of violence it barely seems to keep at bay. He is playing with the form and history of the sonnet with great awareness and making it responsive to the political moment: the verbal wit and play, and the urgency are what struck me most. It looks to me like one of the strongest collections I’ve read for some time."