"It’s no secret around here that I love sonnets, especially the contemporary sonnet because what is a contemporary sonnet anyway. What happens to meter, rhyme, stanzas, subject matter? Hayes’s use of the sonnet creates a beautiful tension between the received form and current American politics and culture. This is Hayes at his most musical, his most eloquent, his most apoplectic.
My little poet heart flutters."
Publisher Penguin Books
Publication Date 2018-06-19
Section New Titles - Paperback / Poetry / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Nathalie B.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780143133186
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.
