“Pain and poignancy collide in this collection of seventy sonnets. “You will find all of signature pleasures and provocations in this new collection: dense lyricism, associative word play, the political, the interpersonal, explorations and interrogations of race and gender and sex and the body and violence and power and history and time.” – Kenyon Review His poems are like the slow and steady picking of a lock, until the door handle clicks.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, Poets and Writers The book, despite its breadth and clever turns, is a confrontation. Overwhelming in its brilliance, yes, but also overwhelming in its pacing, its style. expect to be challenged on nearly every page.” – Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post examines what it means to be an American, to belong, and how it feels to be haunted and hunted by violent racism. But these poems are timeless, by which I mean these sonnets annihilate any difference between past and future.” – Faraz Rizvi, The Millions Hayes’ inhabits the deeply troubling historical moment. These sonnets, existential, political, personal, retain a moral ferocity and urgency. “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is a gift in a fraught moment. These aesthetic and intellectual preoccupations also charge American Sonnets.” –Walton Muyumba, The Los Angeles Times “Hayes’ writing demonstrates a serious commitment to revising, extending, and advancing American poetry while recording, celebrating, and mourning black American life. 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 “A diary of survival during a period when black men are in constant danger.

These poems play with different registers, but they return to lamentation, to annihilating grief for ‘all the black people I’m tired of losing,’ one narrator says.” – Parul Sehgal, The New York Times They are acrid with tear gas, and they unravel with desire. Each one is distinct: Some are sermons, some are swoons. “Hayes set himself the challenge of writing political poems in the guise of love poems. To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Bagley Wright Lecture Series) September 2018Īmerican Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018) ToFloatTrailer from AmericanSonnet on Vimeo.

Sonnets for my past and future assassin