Terrance Hayes
Terrance Hayes is the author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (Penguin, 2018), a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry; To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018); How to Be Drawn (2015); Lighthead (2010), which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. An artist-in-residence at New York University, Hayes currently resides in New York City.
American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
[But there never was a black male hysteria]
But there never was a black male hysteria
Breaking & entering wearing glee & sadness
And the light grazing my teeth with my lighter
To the night with the flame like a blade cutting
Me slack along the corridors with doors of offices
Orifices vomiting tears & fire with my two tongues
Loose & shooing under a high-top of language
In a layer of mischief so traumatized trauma
Delighted me beneath the tremendous
Stupendous horrendous undiscovered stars
Burning where I didn’t know how to live
My friends were all the wounded people
The black girls who held their own hands
Even the white boys who grew into assassins
–
Originally published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets
Links
- Writer’s Website.
- “Tara McEvoy on Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.” The Guardian. 10 March 2019.
- “In A (Prose) Tribute to Fathers and Father-Figures, a Fast-Paced Poet Slows Down.” New York Times. 12 December 2018.
Media
Terrance Hayes Reading I January 21, 2020
Reading I January 21, 2020