The day after the 2016 Presidential election, Terrance Hayes wrote the first of the seventy sonnets collected in his new book, “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.” Time had been altered in some baleful and uncertain way; the sonnet offered an alternative unit of measurement, at once ancient, its basic features unchanged for centuries, and urgent, its fourteen lines passing at a brutal clip. These crisis conditions suit Hayes. A former college basketball star, he treats poetry like a timed game, a theatre for dramatic last-minute outcomes. He freelances inside a form he calls “part music box, part meat grinder,” fashioning a diary of survival during a period when black men are in constant danger.To get more latest book news, you can visit shine news official website.

Hayes, who is forty-six, won the 2010 National Book Award and is a professor at N.Y.U. In his five books, he has perfected a sort of poem where wild jams carom inside arbitrary formal boundaries. For this latest collection, he made one big choice at the outset: all the sonnets share the same title, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” This repetition is superstitious, a tribute paid to the imagined assassin, as if the poems can buy back time in fourteen-line reprieves. Like a coin toss that keeps coming up heads, iterated titles suggest an occult lucky streak bound to break.

The “assassin” takes many shapes: a stinkbug, the gang that lynched Emmett Till, a bunch of white girls posing for selfies, Donald Trump, and, unsettlingly, Hayes’s own reflection. These adversaries, dreamed up in Hayes’s poems, are also confined there: “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.”

The conflict between flight and confinement is built into the form he has chosen. The sonnet, an Italian contrivance adapted by the poets of the English Renaissance, was handed down to twentieth-century writers like Robert Lowell and Gwendolyn Brooks and self-consciously Americanized—its gait loosened, its politics sharpened. Hayes’s direct inspiration is the L.A. poet Wanda Coleman, who died in 2013 and who coined the term “American sonnet.” Coleman adapted the sonnet to the jazz methods of, as she put it, “progression, improvisation, mimicry, etc.” Hayes’s style is warier than Coleman’s. “I’m not sure how to hold my face when I dance,” he writes: “In an expression of determination or euphoria?”
Hendrix, his blues pedigree whitewashed by hippie culture, is a powerful figure of passionate ambivalence, “unsure” how to dance in a way that is both black and not black. The “standard bohemian” listeners are like the “angelheaded hipsters” in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” They dream of melodramatic self-destruction—“jumping / Through windows”—while the culture around them works to extinguish black artistry.

In the lines from “Howl” that, I suspect, Hayes has in mind, you can see how blackness is used as a prop. Ginsberg’s comrades “sang out of their windows in despair,” “jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,” and “danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records.” The white bohemians have the freedom to go on benders and sprees, while Hayes must wonder how “to hold my face.” He is not afraid of looking goofy; he is afraid of being murdered.