Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Poetry

AMERICAN SONNETS FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

Terrance Hayes

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.

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.

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.

Available products
Book Published 2018-06-19 by Penguin
Book Published 2018-06-19 by Penguin

Comments

Here & Now's Robin Young speaks with Hayes about his work. Read more...

Hayes set himself the challenge of writing political poems in the guise of love poems. Each one is distinct: Some are sermons, some are swoons. They are acrid with tear gas, and they unravel with desire... 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.

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... A white reader of these poems has to think hard about his own commodified analysis of them. Read more...

AMERICAN SONNETS FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry today! The announcement was made on the New Yorker website. The finalists will be announced on Monday, October 10. Read more...

Hayes does what poets do for their times. Read more...

The right poetry collection for right now: Terrance Hayes' 'American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin' Read more...

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin... has a claim to be among the first fully-fledged works to reckon with the presidency of Donald Trump - and one of the most surprising... His words call to be read aloud, to be tasted... These poems play with different registers, but they return to lamentation, to annihilating grief for "all the black people I'm tired of losing. Read more...

AMERICAN SONNETS FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN is The Rumpus' June poetry book club pick. Read more...

Terrance Hayes Speaks To American Racism In Latest Collection Of Poetry - NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with poetry reviewer, Tess Taylor about Terrance Hayes' new collection American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin. Every poem is a sonnet, and every sonnet is titled: "American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin." Read more...

Reading like an encyclopedia of literary references, and inspired by iconic poet Wanda Coleman, National Book Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin was written during the first 200 days of the Trump presidency and looks at America's past and present racial tensions; filled with fresh, explosive language and themes of race, violence, music, love, and more. Pre-order it this National Poetry Month, before it lands in bookstores in June. Read more...

Hayes examines what it means to be an American, to belong, and how it feels to be haunted and hunted by violent racism.

The ghosts of America's past and future, its dreams and nightmares, haunt these 70 inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered poems from the inimitable Hayes. Read more...

Athletic, punchy, sardonic, and swift, Hayes delivers his sonnets with a smirk - and also some sadness. Penned during the administration of the "failed landlord," his poems are immediate, and though they are all titled the same as the book, they are varied, Read more...

Terrance Hayes' poetry collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is a National Book Award Short List Finalist!

Overwhelming in every sense. Overwhelming in its brilliance, yes, but also overwhelming in its pacing, its style... The book, despite its breadth and clever turns, is a confrontation... His poems are like the slow and steady picking of a lock, until the door handle clicks.

Rita Dove chose a sonnet for her first poetry pick as editor of The New York Times Magazine and the collection is a NYTBR Editor's Choice selection (both for the week of 7/1)

UK & C: Penguin UK

National Book Award winning poet Terrance Hayes scorches the page with seventy poems written during the first 200 days of the Trump presidency. (The 32 Best Books to Read This Summer) Read more...

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is a gift in a fraught moment. These sonnets, existential, political, personal, retain a moral ferocity and urgency... Hayes' inhabits the deeply troubling historical moment. But these poems are timeless, by which I mean these sonnets annihilate any difference between past and future

Most people should be reading Terrance Hayes. Read more...

These poems puncture a hole in time, fragmenting a grief, a rage, a rebellion, an irony so deep that one can only call them blue. These poems are true; they were true before they were written and will be true in whatever future we are slouching toward. Read more...

The sonnets themselves have all of these different contents within them, but [Hayes is] basically pointing to the force of American racial violence and sort of how repetitive it is... It's like he's made these sonnets to try to contain something uncontainable.

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. Read more...

Hayes is well recognized as a highly accomplished, phenomenally talented poet, whose work interrogates race, America, canonical literature, art, domesticity, history... With this incomparable collection, Hayes... reimagin[es] the possibilities of American literature.