terrance hayes american sonnets for my past and future assassin

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. This bitter earth is a song Clogging the mouth before it is swallowed or spat out.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. After a very long time The bones become dust again & the dust After a long time becomes dirt & the dirt becomes soil And the soil becomes grain again. The number alive equal To the number in graves. For a long time The numbers were balanced. I remember The horror of her head on a pillow. Our warriors, weirdos, antiheroes, our sirs, Sires, our sighers, sidewinders & whiners, winos, And wonders become dust. Small worlds unwhirl in the corners of our homes After death.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin Probably, ghosts are allergic to us.

Terrance hayes american sonnets for my past and future assassin