A leader whose metallic narcissism is a reflection To the kind of awe experienced after beholding a reign It is the story / Of a son whose father is a ghost.” Yet, he pushes the metaphor further, interrogating the role of the symbolic “son,” who is the American people:Īmerica, you just wanted change is all, a return Someone is praying, someone is prey.” Hayes also takes on his characteristic interrogation of fathers and sons by tackling head-on the dysfunctional parent-child relationship America has experienced for the past two years: “Christianity is a religion built around a father / Who does not rescue his son. Some lines blatantly point to the hypocrisy of America: “I carry money bearing / The face of my assassins” or “Something happens everywhere in this country / Every day. He turns an attentive eye to the spectrum of inequities, from police brutality to white women internalizing the n-word through the gleeful consumption of rap music. In a mere eighty-nine pages, Hayes uncoils social commentary that is as poignant as it is creative. Grinder to separate the song of the bird form the bone. I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, In American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Hayes sets a menacing tone: Countless others remain unnamed, haunting our consciousness.
Many of these bodies are ones we know-Maxine Waters, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, the Obama’s, Aretha Franklin. Through a poetics of touching inherent in the very structure of these linked sonnets, Hayes builds a sense of bodies stacked. The corporal anxiety of the collection mirrors the corporality of 2018, a year in which so many bodies were sacrificed. Hayes’s keen focus on bodies creates a striking portrait of contemporary American life. Border Patrol custody and was reminded of the work’s visceral nature. I revisited the politically charged poetry collection on the day a seven-year-old child died while in U.S. Re-reading American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Penguin Poets, 2018) at the end of 2018 was literally hard to stomach.
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